News: Digital Health

US funding for global health security has surged in the last few years, and now Congress has just approved a $510 million increase for fiscal year 2022, nearly doubling current funding. President Biden is proposing even greater increases for fiscal year 2023 in his new budget proposal, including a multilateral fund for global health security and pandemic preparedness. The US has already pledged $250 million to this proposed fund, which has a goal...

When Ebola spread through Liberia in August 2014, health workers needed information—and they needed it fast. We’ve seen exactly the same need during the COVID-19 pandemic. Back in 2014, IntraHealth International and UNICEF created mHero—a two-way, mobile phone-based communication system that connects ministries of health and frontline health workers—to support health-sector communication in Liberia during the Ebola outbreak. The original version...

As part of Kenya’s overarching efforts to build and strengthen its health workforce, the country has provided much-needed financial aid to train more than 40,000 aspiring health workers in the past five years. This is just one way the country is addressing its shortage of health workers and using strategic data to address HIV, COVID-19, and other urgent health challenges. Since 2016, IntraHealth International’s USAID-funded Human Resources for...

I work in South Sudan for IntraHealth International. A lot of people might not realize why collecting and using data efficiently are so important for health services here. But the data we collect inform everything we do, from figuring out how many people need antiretroviral treatment and how many health workers are needed at a specific health facility to helping the government and other funders determine how much to spend on public health...

What does it take to keep HIV services available despite limited resources, political unrest and violence, and a pandemic? For Alfred Okiria, IntraHealth International’s project director for the Strengthening National Capacity for Integrated HIV/AIDS Health Data Collection, Use, and Dissemination in Support of an Evidence-based Response in South Sudan project, and his team in South Sudan, the answer is data. Okiria and his team have been...

Lucy Mphuru and her team have been providing HIV services to hundreds of thousands of clients in Tanzania for 14 years. But when COVID-19 hit the country in 2020, the pandemic threatened to halt these services. So Lucy and her team pivoted quickly. They developed their own creative new approaches to make sure their clients could still access high-quality health care while ensuring the safety of frontline health workers, staff, and the clients...

COVID-19 stole the headlines in 2020—and revealed that most countries were vastly underprepared for a pandemic. But it also shed light on incredible human ingenuity and fortitude. We saw frontline health workers navigate a deluge of COVID cases while also trying to keep crucial services available. We saw the fastest vaccine development in history. And we saw more clearly than ever our need for stronger supply chains, better mental health services...

The COVID-19 pandemic has created plenty of barriers for people living with HIV who need to continue their care and treatment. But when hurricanes Eta and Iota hit Central America in November, the barriers multiplied. Pounding Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, Panama, and Guatemala for days, these two hurricanes brought heavy rains that led to flooding and landslides that devastated communities and affected millions. In the face of these dual...

Before COVID-19, the world was facing a shortage of 18 million health workers by 2030, mostly in low- and middle-income countries. By September of this year, one in seven reported cases of COVID-19 were health workers and at least 7,000 health workers had died—likely significant underestimates due to lack of data. Although the true burden of COVID-19 infections on the health workforce is unknown, the loss of health workers from COVID-19 will have...

More countries are using mHero to tackle their COVID-19 epidemics, including to monitor the health of their frontline health workers, speed up communications between ministries and the front lines, and boost surveillance and response for COVID-19 and other disease threats. During any disease outbreak, real-time communication between national health authorities and frontline health workers is critical to protecting health workers and saving lives...