Global Perspectives on Digital Health

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...

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 p...

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...

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 Decembe...

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 a...

🎯 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...

🚨 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. Nic...

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...

🔍 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 unlockin...

Your Metrics Don’t Matter If No One Gets the Message : Health Tech Comms with James Somauroo of SomX.  Listen on Apple, Spotify. Watch on Youtube. We cover one of the most overlooked drivers of success in health innovation: communication .  Our guest, James Somauroo , has hosted over 400 podcasts and built one of the most influential media and communications agencies in health tech. His work spans...

A conversation on the future of the World Health Organization, rethinking how we approach digital implementation and funding in LMICs, and what it really means to decolonize global health. “Countries need to be in the driver’s seat of their own development agenda… The earmarking of assistance has to stop.” -  Dr. Alain Labrique, Director, Digital and Innovation, World Health Organization Absolutel...

Implementation. What does it mean? Why is it hard? How do we get it right?  Failure. Are we, in Global Digital Health, thinking and acting in a way that doesn't help us move forward? Caroline Perrin, Director of the Geneva Digital Health Hub joins us on the Global Perspectives on Digital Health podcast to share her views on this.  This episode is for the people doing the work to ensure digital hea...

A healthtech investor's view on healthcare in Africa in the next 10 years.  If you’re building or investing for impact with underserved communities in Africa, this episode is for you.  Rowena Luk has walked the talk. She is the ‘OG’ of creating visibility on digital health in Africa, and has built and scaled for impact in over 40 countries on the continent, and has now scaled her own impact to sup...

Practical breadth and depth on the global state of regulation from someone at the cutting edge of regulatory policy.  Shubs welcomes Hugh Harvey, founder of Hardian Health and a regulatory expert in digital health. Shubs and Hugh discuss the complex landscape of medical device regulation worldwide, with emphasis on how these frameworks impact digital health innovation in low and middle-income coun...

Dr. Smisha Agarwal (Johns Hopkins University Global Center for Digital Health Innovation) joins me to unpack some hard truths on the Global Perspectives on Digital Health podcast.    🛑 Why global health systems remain fragile  📉 How digital tools often scale without legitimacy  📊 What’s wrong with our fixation on "did it work?" and significance values  🔁 And how global health is stuck in syste...

Bringing research to implementation. Shubs is joined by Lucy Cesnakova from DiMe in this quick dive into an important piece of research bringing insights to advance digital solutions that serve mental health, DiMe's work here was great here because Lucy and the team intentionally sought out input from different countries, access levels and other demographics across the ecosystem. It's great that t...

Special bonus episode. This is a shortened version of the episode with Jess Morley, focusing on ethical approaches and takeaways relevant for digital health companies. How do you move from  having ethical approaches as 'nice to haves' to actually getting prioritised. It can be tough when good intentions rub up against business realities. Jess shows how you can avoid getting your initiative or feat...

Making Ethics Actionable. What can the UK’s AI Action plan reveal about the state of ethics in the digital health industry? If you are a health system leader or government entity, how do you elevate ethical approaches in your ecosystem? What levers are available? And for the builders: product leaders, founders, clinicians at health tech companies, software engineers, designers, QA folk: how to neg...

🎙️ New Episode: Connecting Global & Local Perspectives in Digital Health Implementation In this special episode, we close out the year with two fantastic guests: Rigveda Kadam , Digital and AI Lead at FIND, and Andrew Muhire , Chief Digital Officer at Rwanda's Ministry of Health. Building on the innovator insights in Rwanda from our previous episode with Dr. Jana Alagarajah , this discussion d...

Implementing a digital mental health solution in Rwanda. What does real, meaningful co-design look like? What does it mean to truly engage with a community to develop a solution they actually use and that addresses their problems? What incentives and mindsets allow us to, instead of 'driving' a certain technology into a context, stop and listen, and go in with no pre-conceived notion of what would...

Overview We are joined in this episode by Ruchit Nagar, the CEO and Co-Founder of Khushi Baby. For his efforts to deliver scalable public health impact, Ruchit has been recognized as a Forbes 30 under 30 leader in Health Care, a World Innovation Summit in Health Young Innovator, and a Distinguished Young Alumnus by by the Yale School of Public Health This episode covers into the role of India's Co...

Episode 6: What can we learn about creating real impact for underserved communities  from The Kingdom of Eswatini, a tiny country enveloped by South Africa? Join us on the latest episode of the Global Perspectives on Digital Health podcast where we hear from Executive Director of The Luke Commission, Echo Vanderwal about the way that set up healthcare services for those who needed it most and adde...

Episode 5: What is the right approach for regulation and evaluation of digital health technologies? In this conversation, Shubs Upadhyay interviews Stephen Gilbert, a professor of medical device regulatory science, about the challenges and successes of digital health regulation and implementation. They discuss the need for flexibility in regulation, the importance of feedback from clinicians and p...

Episode 4: Creating real impact with AI in isolated communities In this episode, Dino, a pioneer in the digital health landscape, shares his insights on how digital solutions and AI are revolutionizing the healthcare industry. He discusses the critical challenges such as overcrowded healthcare facilities and the urgent need for support for healthcare professionals. Dino’s extensive work at Audere...

Episode 3: How do we meaningfully bridge policy and real impact at the last mile of healthcare.  Shubs Upadhyay interviews Bilal Mateen, Executive Director of Digital Square at PATH about digital health challenges and successes in underserved communities. They explore the importance of safety, regulatory considerations, and the need for inclusive data sets and data infrastructure. The discussion a...