Increasingly, digital technologies are transforming the delivery of health services and the functioning of health systems. Many of these technologies have also presented new ways of doing research and informed rapid decision-making. In this episode, we hear how UNICEF worked with Jamaica to rapidly deploy an electronic registry solution for the COVID-19 vaccine. We also learn that the Government of the Philippines created a huge opportunity for research by allowing open access to data from COVID-19 tests.
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Dr Karin Källander is a Senior Health Adviser and Chief of the Digital Health & Information Systems Unit in the UNICEF Health Programme. This includes operationalizing the UNICEF digital health approach and supporting the identification, validation, and scale-up of digital health interventions for health priorities, such equitable coverage of vaccines, quality maternal and child health services, and adolescent mental health.
She is the co-founder and UNICEF lead of the COVID-19 Digital Health Centre of Excellence (DICE), a UNICEF-WHO co-led mechanism to deliver agile and coordinated technical assistance to National Governments on sustainable and scalable deployment of carefully chosen mature digital health solutions that address health priorities in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and post-pandemic health system’s needs.
She previously worked as Senior Research Advisor at Malaria Consortium in London, UK, and as Visiting Lecturer at the department of Epidemiology & Biostatistics, MUSPH in Uganda, where she lived and worked for 7 years.
She is a specialist in childhood pneumonia, digital health and health systems research as well as community-based primary healthcare.
She is Associate Professor at the Department of Global Health at Karolinska Institutet, Sweden and has 20 years’ experience as health systems researcher, lecturer, and programme coordinator.
