Digital Health in Primary Health Care

Here is a brief introduction of our moderator and speakers:

Loko Abraham is chief of party of the USAID Digital Health Activity in Ethiopia. The USAID DHA is a prime partner in HIS for the Ethiopian MoH. The activity supports digitization of all priority health information systems including those used in PHC; generation and use of quality data at point of generation and higher up; and build the capacity of the health workforce to improve competence and sustainability. He has served as Director General the Ethiopian Pharmaceutical Supply Agency, a national health commodities supply chain operator managing 80% of all procurements and distribution in Ethiopia. Prior to EPSA, he has served as Chief executive Director of a teaching university Hospital. Loko has received his MD from University of Gonder and has specialized in child health and pediatrics from Addis Ababa University. He has also graduate level education in public health leadership and higher institution management. </br
Dr. Smisha Agarwal is an Assistant Professor in the Department of International Health at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the Research Director of the Global mHealth Initiative at Johns Hopkins. She studies how to improve maternal and newborn health in low-income settings through strengthening community health systems and leveraging innovative technological solutions including digital devices. Over the last decade, she has supported the development of programs that employ digital tools such as mobile phones to improve health care services for women and children. This has included the development of point-of-care digital clinical decision support tools used by community health workers and other health care providers, and patient-focused SMS-based health behavior change interventions, and conversational agents (“chatbots”) that use natural language processing to communicate with users. She has also developed methods for evaluating such digital programs and led a series of systematic Cochrane reviews on the effectiveness of digital clinical decision support tools and longitudinal health records that have been leveraged by the WHO to develop global guidelines on the use of digital tools to strengthen health services.
Tigest Tamrat is a Technical Officer at the World Health Organization based in Geneva, Switzerland. Her work focuses on the use of digital technologies to accelerate health system improvements and support reproductive, maternal, newborn, child and adolescent health. Within this role, she has coordinated multisite research on the design and impact of digital tools as well as leading key WHO resources in digital health. She led the development of WHO’ Guidelines on digital interventions for health system strengthening, the Classification of Digital Health Interventions, Digital Investment Implementation Guide (DIIG), mHealth Assessment and Planning for Scale (MAPS) Toolkit, a handbook on Monitoring and Evaluation of Digital Health Interventions, and the web-based Digital Health Atlas. Ms Tamrat was also part of the team that pioneered the flagship WHO SMART Guidelines initiative, which includes Digital Adaptation Kits and computable guideline content. Trained as an epidemiologist, she holds a Master’s in Public Health from Columbia University.
Farzana Misha is an applied economist with over 12 years of experience in impact evaluations, research coordination and program design with a focus on social safety-nets, health, digital and financial inclusion. Her research leverages tools from economics, public health, behavioral economic theory, and impact evaluation methods to determine whether and how different interventions can improve health outcomes for marginalized populations. She has a strong experiential base and understanding of multifaceted and multisectoral development programming. She has recently been engaging in the digital health space, particularly on how digital tools can be used to provide health and financial inclusionary services among the vulnerable and hard to reach.
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