Global Perspectives on Digital Health

What a pleasure it was to have Rohit Malpani and Peiling Yap on the show, editors of a new journal about AI in Global health. 

This one is for researchers, implementers of digital and AI tools in low resource settings. 

We cover:

• The challenges for people in the so called Global South to have a leading voice in academia. 
• Hype and reality on AI: premiums on speed to publish and oneupmanship vs investigating what really makes things work
• Why publishing things that went wrong or unexpectedly is needed even more
• How academic journals and publishing can do better
• How people in digital health and AI in healthcare should approach evidence generation
• The future of academic publishing in a world increasingly short of attention, patience and deep work
• How Ronny Chieng’s Harvard address can make us think critically about what we should be optimising towards. 

Plus what the new RSTM AI in Global Health journal is looking for and what type of papers most excite them

Links!
Ronny Chieng Harvard address. Seriously, watch it.
IDRC funded AI4GH work mentioned by Peiling, also published in a great special collection in npj Digial Medicine
Big tech hiring philosophers article
Industry AI research article
Conversational agents are super communicative, not super intelligent article

New Video series!
Finally, check out a brand new Youtube video series about Tech for Global health challenges. The first one is on Tuberculosis, with the Wellcome Trust, QureAI, AI Diagnostics, Community Health Impact Coalition and Audere.

If you liked this episode, share with people who would learn from it! And head over to gpodh.org and check out a few related ones. Leave us a review or send us a message. 
1. Evaluation Level up with Shay Soremekun
2. Implementation 101 and how to fail well with Caroline Perrin

Want to sponsor a deep dive episode? Get in touch at gpodh.org

The most vulnerable moment in any human life is the first few hours. In this episode, Shubs talks with Dr. Josh Bress, pediatrician, President of Global Strategies and Medical Director of NoviGuide, a tool used nearly half a million times to help nurses in remote facilities across Africa manage critical newborn care. Josh shares his experiences and stories from Eastern Congo, why paper guidelines fail at the bedside, how configuration (not customization) is the key to scaling, what it actually looks like to delight frontline health workers, and what's kept his team going through 15 years of building at the last mile. Essential listening for anyone building for impact in global health.

Key takeaways

• Paper guidelines end up on shelves, digital care pathways get to the bedside. Josh compares paper guidelines to an atlas and Novi Guide to Google Maps. Built right, digital can adapt to what you actually have, flow with real clinical decisions, and stay available at 3am.
• Configuration, not customisation, is how you scale. Everyone told Josh he'd have to rebuild NoviGuide for every country. He didn't. Clinical guidelines differ in predictable ways. The real variation is at the site level: what drugs, equipment, and diagnostics are available. Build for that and you can scale without starting from scratch.
• Delight your end user. Nurses turned NoviGuide into a verb. They trained others with more passion than Josh's own team could. They hit the feedback button asking for more. Treat frontline health workers as true customers, not passive recipients.
• Local leadership is the engine of scale. Josh has personally met fewer than a dozen of NoviGuide's users across nearly half a million uses. Scale happened because local leaders like Dr. Nakakeeto in Uganda took ownership and made the tool their own.

This is practical, heartfelt and full of so much wisdom for people building, developing policy or funding tech solutions for healthcare in low resource settings. 

About Joshua

Dr. Joshua Bress is a pediatrician and leads the nonprofit Global Strategies, where he serves as the medical director of the NoviGuide clinical decision support platform. He completed his undergraduate studies at Harvard University, attended medical school at Vanderbilt University, and then completed his pediatric residency at the University of California, San Francisco. 
After residency, he moved to eastern Congo, living and working in the city of Goma from 2011 to 2012. That experience, and the challenges of sustaining high-quality care in resource-limited settings, led him to focus on clinical decision support. 
Today, he works with a multidisciplinary team to develop and scale NoviGuide, a point-of-care platform used by nurses and clinicians to deliver guideline-based care for newborns and children, helping bridge the gap between training, guidelines, and real-world clinical practice.​

• (00:00) - Introduction to Global Health and Neonatology

Joe Alderman has this great ability to break down complex things into a good hearty discussion. Joe is an Anaesthetist by night and AI academic by day. His insights on what it takes to deploy and monitor AI in healthcare with a lens on not leaving people behind are relevant wherever in the world you are.

We discussed some of the nuance and challenges around AI in healthcare, as well as some anti patterns 

• If you are a data or AI scientist, or shipping AI products, what can you do starting tomorrow to begin thinking more proactively about underserved communities or ensure you’re not creating unintended harm to vulnerable groups. 
• Stuff the industry is not doing great on: We’re starting with the dataset or the technology we happen to have, instead of working backwards from what we are fundamentally trying to achieve in the world. (If I nodded any more at this point my head would have rolled off)
• A revisit on where things are with the Standing Together initiative, something Xiao Liu talked about in the very first episode.  In the UK, there are big areas where life expectancy is falling. Health inequalities are rising. Our datasets have bias. It’s tempting to fall into the narrative that this is a tech deficiency problem. It is not. It is a whole society problem and we’re not going to solve it with JUST tech. 
• If govts, regulators and health systems find it challenging to be on top of the safety issues with LLMs, how are lay people going to? Joe covers how the upcoming work of the Healthcare Chatbot User Guide can help people navigate some of the key things they need to consider

We cover a LOT in this 1 hour discussion, including how patients and clinicians can think more critically about which tasks to best use Gen AI with, and how to think about safety and liability. 

This one is for AI and data scientists, product folk, developers and clinicians. Get it on your weekend playlist

Links:

MHRA’s National Commission into the Regulation of AI in Healthcare: https://www.gov.uk/government/groups/national-commission-into-the-regulation-of-ai-in-healthcare

Building The Health Chatbot Users’ Guide: https://healthchatbotguide.org/

The NHS Fellowship in Clinical AI: https://www.nhsfellowship.ai/

NHS Digital Clinical Safety Training: https://digital.nhs.uk/services/clinical-safety/clinical-risk-management-training

Chapters
00:00 Introduction and Joe's work
06:36 The Role of AI in Patient Care
07:52 Navigating AI Risks and Benefits
18:13 Addressing Health Data Poverty
24:28 Building Responsible AI Systems
30:18 Exploring Large Language Models in Healthcare
34:05 Addressing Bias and Representativeness in AI Models
40:04 Navigating Regulatory Challenges for AI Technologies
40:51 Empowering Patients in the Age of AI
44:32 Public Perception and Trust in Digital Health
47:00 Identifying Real Problems in Healthcare Technology
52:00 The Future of AI in Healthcare
55:29 Joe's insights for those building in low resource settings
56:57 A book recommendation and critical thinking for patients and clinicians

About Joe

Joe is an NHS anaesthetist in the UK and an NIHR clinical lecturer (assistant professor) in AI and digital health at the University of Birmingham, UK. 

He leads mixed-methods research and policy engagement to help get the most from AI in healthcare - including the STANDING Together initiative. He recently founded an international initiative to build ‘The Health Chatbot Users’ Guide’.

How do global organizations built to respond and aid in conflict respond to digital transformation? The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) : you’re probably familiar with the work that happens here : emergencies, conflict zones, disasters, working at the last mile in difficult circumstances. How does an organization like even begin to approach “tech innovation” There’s clearly lots of need.

What do you prioritize when everyone needs improvements now? 

PLUS How do you adapt off the shelf LLM models for remote humanitarian contexts?

Javier Elkin spent 3 years as Head of Digital Health at ICRC. He set the unit up from scratch. Coming in at a time, post COVID, the opportunities for tech addressing unmet need proliferated. And in parallel trying to create stability with multiple financial crises and organizational challenges.  

If you’re in digital health and wrestling with the global scale and local trust and value tradeoffs, have a listen to how an actual global organization dealt with it. 

Some standouts for me from our convo:

1. We spoke about context : correctness vs being useful

If you ask a LLM : What do I do for this gunshot or limb trauma, it might be reasonable to say that a response like : call emergency services is universally correct. 

But in a conflict zone or very rural setting, that has zero value compared to “take two pieces of wood to act as a splint”, or try X to stem blood loss.

How did the ICRC digital team work (with partners at EPFL) on their validation and evaluation to get better at these aspects?

Your LLM might be technically, and even medically correct, but completely useless on the ground for someone. 

Want to find out more about the MOOVE initiative? Take me there

2. Prioritization based on outcomes, constraints, feasibility

Link to assessment framework

3. We get some proper concrete examples that cover:

• How they used tech to aid a handover to a local healthcare system in Western Nigeria after years of being there. 
• How they used an open source tool already being used in the field to help spin up digital workflow solutions FAST
• How they partnered with EPFL to develop testing, validation and evaluation pipelines for LLM decision support specific and relevant for conflict settings (some absolute gold in here)

We also get Javier’s honest reflections about the humanitarian sector in general : how the financial crises (esp the last year with huge funding challenges) have manifested, what next for the humanitarian sector and what could be done differently. 

Packed with lessons this one, do not miss it.

Chapters:

00:00 Introduction to Digital Health and Javier's Journey
07:55 Approach to creating a digital health unit from scratch
13:53 Prioritization Framework at the digital health
22:32 Innovative Solutions in Humanitarian Health
29:21 Strategic Handover and Local Ownership
35:20 Integrating Digital Health in Conflict Zones
41:21 Evaluating AI in Humanitarian Settings
53:26 Reflections on Trust and the Humanitarian Sector

At the end of last year I got the chance to record the first episode of the show in an actual studio. Still a lot to learn about this versus virtually, but Patty Mecheal was a gracious and very awesome guest. 

Patty, CEO of healthenabled brings nearly three decades of mHealth and digital health experience into this discussion we recorded during the Global Digital Health Forum in Nairobi in December 2025.  

After a tumultuous year of policy shifts with USAID funding, WHO shifts and the cascading challenges globally, our conversation examines how we got here and where we need to go when ethics and inclusivity are politically sidelined.

What we cover:

• The state of 2025 - USAID cuts and their ripple effects on healthcare and digital health in underserved communities
• Lessons from the 1990s to now - what patterns keep repeating, and what fundamental mistakes we're still making
• Women as decision-makers AND consumers - why this isn't just the "right thing to do" (though it is), but represents massive unmet market opportunity
• Value and context in evaluation - how to actually assess digital health and AI tools in ways that matter
• Leadership with values - Patty's honest reflections on what she's learned and gotten wrong
• Building responsibly when the incentives don't reward it - what does ethical implementation look like now?

This episode is for you if you:

• Build digital health or AI solutions
• Make policy or funding decisions
• Research or evaluate health interventions
• Are working on impact in women’s health

Unfiltered, real insights from someone who's seen it all. 

Chapters and Timestamps

00:00 Introduction to Global Perspectives on Digital Health

01:24 Reflections on the Global Digital Forum

04:03 Patti's Journey and Background

08:20 Aha Moments in Public Health

11:46 The Importance of Data in Health Interventions

16:01 Learning from low resource settings

21:55 Building Trust in Digital Health Solutions

24:50 Balancing Scalability and Trust

30:22 The Role of Compassion in Healthcare

40:53 The Theory of Change in Digital Health

46:13 Bootstrapping Innovations in Digital Health

52:49 Compassionate Leadership and Ethical Practices

57:08 The Role of Women in Health and Technology

About Patty:
Dr. Patricia (Patty) Mechael is a global digital health leader, speaker, and award-winning author with nearly 30 years of experience shaping equity-centered health and technology initiatives across more than 45 countries. She is Co-Founder and CEO of health.enabled, where she leads the Global Digital Health Monitor and Digital Health and AI Strategy efforts with Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, WHO, UNICEF, and others. She is also a Senior Associate Professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health where she serves as the Co-Principal Investigator for the Gates Foundation’s Digital Health Exemplars and where she also teaches a course on Gender-intentional Digital Health. Known for translating complex ideas into human, actionable insights, Patty writes and speaks widely on responsible AI, gender equity, and the future of work and health—bringing a grounded, compassion-driven leadership lens shaped by both evidence and lived experience.

I sat down to talk to Nadia Kadhim, co-founder of Naq about digital identity and healthcare for displaced people. 

Nadia’s father was a refugee, and we hear about her journey into human rights law and eventually into data security and compliance. 

We cover:

• That digital identity for displaced people is messed up. 
• How this creates very real barriers to care (with examples)
• How healthcare systems aren’t set up for real access or meaningful care for refugees
• Can we even do anything about this when political agenda in many places cares less and less about this?
• Why, even so, we should wake up - the likelihood of us being displaced due to conflict or climate change is going up. How would we want to be cared for?
• This is an everybody problem, which is part of why it’s so hard to solve. 

If you’re into policy, data security, health and digital for displaced people, or building tools that could be being used by refugees, you’ll gain a lot from spending less than an hour on this topic. 

If you care about this topic you should also listen to the episode with Aral Surmeli. Inspiring in equal measure.

Chapters
00:00 Introduction to Digital Health and Human Rights
07:19 Data, Identity, and Access to Healthcare
10:39 Challenges Faced by Refugees in Healthcare
15:21 Real-Life Stories of Refugees and Healthcare Access
20:32 Why no solution yet?
23:01 The Future of Healthcare for Displaced People
30:29 The Role of Funding and Multi-Stakeholder Approaches
31:59 Data and Human Lives: The Health Data Poverty Problem
34:22 Ethics and Regulatory Compliance in Digital Health
38:22 Ownership and Security of Health Data
43:13 Nadia's Recommendations for Policy Makers and Digital Health Founders

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Global Perspectives on digital health shares the insights of innovators, donors, policy makers and researchers on what it takes to create impact at the last mile with digital health and AI in underserved communities around the world through audio and video. 

We’re telling the underreported stories of impact that the digital health industry needs to pay more attention to. 

There’s a growing back catalogue of over 20 engaging, inspiring and real conversations about the places in the world where the biggest challenges lie, but where the deepest impact in healthcare is happening. Tune in on gpodh.org

Subscribing and sharing really helps get this to the noggins of people who care about this topic. If you found this useful, please leave us a comment and some review stars.

🎯 Evaluation! A make or break thing in the digital health. 

I sat down with Dr Shay Soremekun from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine to talk about the very hot topic of evidence generation and evaluation. 

Everyone's talking about LLM evals, technical performance, benchmarking. 

But ultimately people care about impact. Yet impact is rarely a neat, linear path to a yes/no answer. Anyone who's actually implemented something in the field knows about all the other contributing factors, the daily challenges and how hard it is to move the needle on big clinical outcomes with robust clinical evaluation.

Because that will help us to understand how we need to potentially modify or adapt the intervention either in the same place or in future places to be able to achieve the same success. 

🌟 Who will benefit from listening to this episode?

• Digital health companies : Founders, data scientists, AI/ML scientists, PMs, designers, clinical evaluation/study teams, clinicians
• Funders : donors, investors
• Global and public health professionals
• Implementers
• Researchers
• Regulators

Shay explains the use of Program Theory and Logic models to visually connect your intervention, all the intermediate steps (not just technology, but people and change) to outputs, outcomes and long term impact.  Making space to observe other levers in the system you didn't initially anticipate. 

The work that Shay and her team have done with The Malaria Consortium and LSTM's Centre for Evaluation looking at a digital health tool for community health workers in villages and facilities showed this perfectly. Because they were intentional about observing the whole system, they discovered other factors contributing to impact and could redirect efforts accordingly.

In this age of tightening budgets, and pressure to show clean shiny KPIs, how do you make room to observe these things? 

We also discussed decolonizing evaluation: capturing what's locally valuable, not just paradigms of success developed in comfortable offices and ivory towers.

So many learnings here for understanding good co-design, implementation, and how to measure what matters.

Chapters
00:00 Intro
04:15 Mozambique digital health tool for CHWs : context
14:19 Tsking a system lens approach
16:25 Measuring What Matters in Health Interventions
23:02 Resourcefulness in Low-Resource Settings
27:25 Challenges and Successes in Digital Interventions
29:34 Proactive Measurement and Adaptation
31:20 Scaling Up Successful Interventions
32:59 Revolutionizing Evaluation Practices
39:38 Incorporating Indigenous Knowledge in Evaluations
44:57 Key Recommendations for Measuring What Matters
 

💡 Keep learning!
If you found this episode helpful listen to:
Episode 15 : Implementation 101 and how to Fail well with Caroline Perrin
Episode 12 : Health First, Innovation second, with Smisha Aggarwal
Episode 5 : What is the right approach for regulation and evaluation of digital health technologies?

I have also written a Substack article summarising what I learned from this episode. Check it out for easy reference to the concepts outlined.

Found it useful? Know someone who is struggling with this very thing? Share and keep raising the profile of people impacting underserved community globally.

References and links to things we spoke about

inSCALE papers:

https://journals.plos.org/digitalhealth/article?id=10.1371/journal.pdig.0000235

https://journals.plos.org/digitalhealth/article?id=10.1371/journal.pdig.0000217

Link for upSCALE  (roll-out of project):

https://www.malariaconsortium.org/projects/upscale

https://www.malariaconsortium.org/resources/integrating-upscale-into-the-ministry-of-health

 
Study protocol for Uganda and Mozambique:
https://trialsjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13063-015-0657-6
 

Links to Chilisa Bagele – one of the most foremost voices on decolonial evaluation methodology so a good start for anyone interested (talk at LSHTM):

https://www.lshtm.ac.uk/newsevents/events/decoloniality-and-indigenous-methods-global-health-evaluation-professor-bagele

Centre for Evaluation Website 

https://www.lshtm.ac.uk/research/centres/centre-evaluation

About Dr Shay Soremekun
Dr Shay Soremekun is an epidemiologist and co-deputy Director of the Centre for Evaluation at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

Her research in child and adolescent health and development covers trials of low-cost disease prevention programmes, and identification of risk factors and mitigation strategies for poor developmental and economic outcomes in this group. She is a member of the UK Government Evaluation and Trial Advice Panel (ETAP), and sits on the steering committee for the John Snow Society. She lectures at postgraduate level on topics of evaluation, epidemiology and public health, and has developed and organises an MSc module in Study Design.

LSHTM page: https://www.lshtm.ac.uk/aboutus/people/soremekun.shay

🚨 Nick Martin, social impact titan, one of the biggest voices out there in this space with a huge following and community, helping connect people to jobs, funding and much more.  Founder and CEO of TechChange, working with funders, government and tech, and giving people the skills they need to create real impact. 

We’ve talked a lot about the impacts of the USAID funding cuts on this podcast. Nick, who has worked shares his view on the impact on grantees, humans and more. We cover:

We also talked about the upcoming Global Digital Health Forum, a gathering that has been going strong for years, and why this year feels particularly important to bring people in global and digital health together. The next one at the time of recording is 3-5 December 2025, online and in Nairobi in person. If you're into Global Digital Helath and underserved communities, this is a great gathering to attend.

If you are working in this space, dealing with the uncertainty, either as an organization or an individual, then this podcast is for you. 

Nick shares some of the wisdom and insights he has gained over the years, and why community across borders is such an integral part of how we shape what global digital health looks like in the next 10 years. 

Check it out - share with others working in the space. Leave us a comment or review - it really helps us reach more people. 

00:00 Intro : Nick's story
03:58 USAID cuts. Before, during, after : reflections from the development sector
21:13 Career transition advice
24:14 Funders need to step up more, but it's not that simple
26:34 TechChange origins
28:22 The Global Digital Health Forum : bringing people together
34:30 Fail festivals and creating the space to talk about failure
38:56 Wisdom corner : Nick's top tips

Liked this episode? What to listen to next:
- Episode 15: Implementation 101 and how to fail well
- Episode 16 : How the WHO is evolving

What to read next:
Check out my Substack : Can Global Health and Venture Capital Get Along?

About Nick

Nick Martin is the Founder and CEO of TechChange, a social enterprise that has become a leading provider of digital health training and convening solutions worldwide. Under his leadership, TechChange has trained thousands of Ministry of Health officials in more than 90 countries through flagship programs such as Digital Health: Planning National Systems, developed in partnership with USAID, WHO, and Digital Square.

He also leads the Global Digital Health Forum, the premier annual gathering for policymakers, donors, researchers, and implementers working at the intersection of technology and health. With two decades of experience in global development and public health, Nick has built partnerships with organizations including USAID, UNICEF, WHO, and the Gates Foundation. His work has been featured in outlets such as The Economist, Forbes, The New York Times, and Fast Company, highlighting his role in advancing digital health and social impact through technology.

As underserved communities go, refugees are up there as the most vulnerable.

We already have systemic and deep challenges for physical health services not being designed for displaced people, and has we rush to bolt on digital and LLMs to everything, are we stopping and thinking about the key needs of these communities?

And a word on innovation in humanitarian settings. This is not a problem that investors go for with attractive returns, or something you can meet the market where it is at. Rather, its down to governments and philanthropy to help invest in this. Aral recounts the massive challenge HERA have had to overcome after USAID funding was cut and how he has navigated and needed to prioiritize after the stop work order.

Aral is the founder of HERA Digital health. HERA have built a tool that serves Syrian refugees in Turkey - targeted initially at mothers to be and mothers with young children, who, in the mess of trying to rebuild any semblance of routine in refugee camps would miss key antenatal or child development appointments. Aral saw the problems the community were having, and as a doctor in the ER in Turkey saw the downstream effects of this.

Some key takeaways for me:

• In humanitarian settings, context is not static and always changing. 
• HERA hired developers who were in the refugee camps - short feedback loops and people immersed in the context. This is a great example of 'Build with, not for"
• The communities he is serving do not get to quit, why should he
• Defining what success is in this context - it is not about HERA surviving, or Aral being successful, but the work, and the impact to those people. So he is optimizing decisions for that - and this means he can be open to other options. 

This episode is not a shiny rainbow story, but one about real struggle. Aral is still on the path of struggle and working to navigate through. If you care about what he is doing, seriously, get in touch with him.

Chapters
00:00 Introduction to Digital Health Innovations
05:05 The Journey of Aral Surmeli: From Medicine to Tech
07:47 Understanding Refugee Health Needs
10:13 Building HERA: The Digital Health Tool
18:23 Cultural Sensitivity in Health Solutions
28:01 Navigating Challenges in Humanitarian Innovation
30:50 Funding Dilemmas in Humanitarian Contexts
36:01 Adapting Strategies for Sustainability
44:03 The Role of Digital Identity in Healthcare
46:51 Finding Hope Amidst Challenges
48:50 Advice for Aspiring Humanitarian Innovators

About Aral:
https://heradigitalhealth.org/

Dr. Aral Surmeli is the Founder and CEO of HERA Digital Health, a nonprofit organization that helps refugee women and children access local healthcare through AI-powered digital tools. With a strong foundation in humanitarian health and digital innovation, Dr. Surmeli has led HERA to serve over 300,000 users, providing services like immunization reminders, prenatal care tracking, and digital health records—accessible even in low-connectivity settings via WhatsApp and offline apps.

HERA began its work in Turkey with Syrian refugees and is now expanding across the Middle East and Africa. The platform is open source, co-designed with local healthcare workers and refugee communities, and integrates with national health systems and NGO services.

Dr. Surmeli holds an MPH from Harvard University and is currently pursuing a DrPH at Johns Hopkins University. He is a former Innovation Fellow at Harvard Humanitarian Initiative and has been supported by organizations such as Google.org, Grand Challenges Canada, MIT Solve, and Harvard iLab. HERA was recently a finalist at the AI for Good Summit's Impact Awards, and Dr. Surmeli is an active voice on the intersection of AI, digital health, and humanitarian response

🔍 I speak with Rubayat Khan, a systems thinker, entrepreneur, and now investor at the Endless Foundation, where he is helping reimagine how global health innovation is funded and delivered.

We unpack what it means to move beyond vertical health solutions, how to prioritize innovation in an era of shrinking aid budgets, and how large language models (LLMs) might be the missing piece in unlocking integrated, people-centered care especially in low-resource settings. We also talk about the challenges, risks, pitfalls and how to think about the right counterfactuals for the context when we evaluate LLMs in healthcare.

Rubayat brings the rare perspective of someone who has been a patient, builder, and funder, and who now advocates for rethinking everything from clinic hours to global incentive structures.

🔑 In this episode:

• Why governments are not always best placed to design people-centered care : an example of this was the fact that government run clinical in villages in rural Bangladesh were only open 10am till 2pm. And so nobody would access them as people are working on the fields or caring for their family. 
• Four priority areas Endless Foundation is focusing on
• How LLMs could shift access, quality, and cost curve if implemented thoughtfully
• Why self-care is the blind spot we can no longer afford to ignore
• The dangers of "digital colonialism" and what needs to change in global AI governance
• What funders can do differently to support impact beyond rhetoric

🗣️ Key Quotes

“Most of what we call healthcare happens outside clinics. If we ignore that, we miss the biggest opportunity for real impact.”

To paraphrase Rubayat:
"A consultation with a doctor in Bangladesh averages 48 seconds. There should be little surprise that people (including Rubayat's parents!) find value and better quality information with a LLM than they would in their own contexts. 

So much valuable insight for people who are building, or wrestling how to invest or fund the right interventions for last mile impact in LMICs. 

🎧 Listen if you’re:

• A global health funder or innovator rethinking priorities post development cuts
• A builder working on AI in healthcare
• A policymaker exploring people-centered design
• An innovator aiming to solve real problems in underserved settings

Share, subscribe, comment, leave us a 5 star review. It really helps us reach people who would find this useful. 

About Rubayat

Reubayat's Substack: https://rubayatkhan.substack.com/

Rubayat Khan is a health entrepreneur and technologist from Bangladesh and currently Director of Health Programs at Endless Network, a US family foundation. Prior to Endless, Rubayat co-founded mPower Social Enterprises and Jeeon, which have both pioneered innovative models for delivering healthcare and other essential services to last-mile populations across 15 countries, currently reaching over 120 million people. Rubayat is a passionate advocate for bottom-up and user-centered thinking in global health, and has written extensively in leading global publications like the Guardian, SSIR and Frontiers in Public Health. He is an Acumen and Aspen New Voices Fellow, and is currently based in Baltimore with his wife and two children.

• (00:00) - Introduction