The New “LLMs”: How Long-Lasting Mechanisms for Decision-making Can Turn AI Investment into Lasting Impact

The New “LLMs”: How Long-Lasting Mechanisms for Decision-making Can Turn AI Investment into Lasting Impact

Blog
Authors: Heather Lanthorn, Joao Ricardo Nickenig Vissoci, Krishna Udayakumar Key Takeaways Accelerating AI investment amid shrinking health aid creates new opportunities and new challenges. While new commitments are promising, they are multi-year investments that depend on rapidly eroding health systems and a smaller workforce. Country-aligned investments can still create silos. Governments must integrate donor-funded AI investments into a sovereign agenda, national plans, and budgets—and retain the authority to redirect, sequence, or decline them. AI tools will make evidence more accessible and choices more plentiful; humans must still make tough decisions. Governments need pipeline visibility and durable decision mechanisms to compare AI tools with one another and with other health priorities. AI can strengthen public judgment; it cannot replace the people accountable for exercising it. AI investments must strengthen long-lasting mechanisms…
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Food for Trust: What nutrition teaches us about building trust in health

Food for Trust: What nutrition teaches us about building trust in health

Blog
Food and nutrition are among the most personal—and most public—parts of our lives. They connect us to family, culture, identity, and values as well as health. They also reveal how health advice travels: through science, through policy, and through the messengers and media to which we choose to listen and learn. At Food for Trust: Nutrition Guidance, Influence, and Lessons on Trust in Health, part of Duke Global Health Institute’s Think Global series, panelists explored how nutrition guidance is made, communicated, and followed. Organized by the Duke Global Health Innovation Center and moderated by the Center’s Heather Lanthorn, the event (you can watch the video here!) tied directly to Healthier Together—an initiative jointly incubated by Duke, Your Local Epidemiologist, and COVID Collaborative—building infrastructure for the next generation of grassroots, trustworthy…
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Students Aid Rural Pamlico County in Improving Health Access

Students Aid Rural Pamlico County in Improving Health Access

Blog
Now in its fourth year, DGHI’s summer student research project may offer a template for counties facing challenges in providing health services to rural residents. By Mary-Russell Roberson; This post originally appeared on the Duke Global Health Institute’s website on August 25, 2025. View the original here: https://duke.is/r/8u2y. This summer, Duke sophomore Tanya Sachdev was paddling in a dragon boat in Oriental, North Carolina, when someone on the boat began to experience stroke symptoms. The group paddled to shore and waited for EMS, who took the patient to the nearest hospital – 45 minutes away in New Bern. “You’re seeing firsthand the impact of being in a rural place,” said Sachdev, a global health major from Cary, N.C. “Growing up in Cary, I’ve taken healthcare access for granted.” Sachdev spent…
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Heart Failure in Sub-Saharan Africa: Current and Future Systems of Care

Heart Failure in Sub-Saharan Africa: Current and Future Systems of Care

Blog, Published Paper
Download the full article from the Journal of Asian Pacific Society of Cardiology. This piece argues that heart failure (HF) is an increasingly important but under-addressed health-system challenge in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Unlike in high-income countries, HF often affects younger adults in SSA, with hypertension, cardiomyopathy, and rheumatic heart disease among the leading causes. Patients frequently present late, contributing to substantially higher mortality and rehospitalization rates than global averages. The authors (including Krishna Udayakumar, and G Titus Ngeno, of Duke Global Health Innovations Center), emphasize that the challenge extends beyond clinical capacity. Limited financing, high out-of-pocket costs, inadequate insurance coverage, shortages of trained health workers, limited diagnostic capacity, and concentration of services in tertiary hospitals all constrain access to effective HF care. Even when guideline-recommended medicines are available, their cost can make sustained treatment…
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QuickStart COVID-19 Test and Treat resources leveraged to support Marburg and Mpox response in Rwanda 

QuickStart COVID-19 Test and Treat resources leveraged to support Marburg and Mpox response in Rwanda 

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Rwanda’s Ministry of Health leveraged COVID-19 resources, established through the QuickStart COVID-19 Test-and-Treat Initiative, to respond to the Marburg Virus Disease (MDV) and Claude 1b Mpox outbreak. The Ministry of Health invited the QuickStart team in Rwanda to support various response efforts including development of guidelines and standard operating procedures, supply chain management and strengthening the capacity of healthcare workers to respond to the outbreaks. QuickStart investments have contributed to Rwanda’s health system resilience and pandemic preparedness capacity underscoring the importance of building sustainable investments for resilient health systems.   Learn more.
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Building trust in health

Blog, News
Trust in traditional health authorities and information is declining, while capabilities to create and spread false or misleading content are growing stronger. This is set against a backdrop of increasing skepticism in institutions, artificial intelligence reach, and disasters both natural and human-made. Allowing these trends to continue will have health and social ramifications that are increasingly dramatic, deep, and deadly. Against these currents, many trustworthy individuals and organizations act in physical and virtual communities with good intentions—but insufficient coordination, capacity, and community engagement. This results in duplicative content and capacity-building on some topics, scant support on other topics, and continual, costly reinvention of the wheel. It creates an environment that is not only inefficient and potentially inequitable but also works against trust building as well as positive behavior and policy…
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Meet 5 of the Organizations Making an Impact Through the Global Health Innovation Grants Program, Blog Series 4 of 4

Meet 5 of the Organizations Making an Impact Through the Global Health Innovation Grants Program, Blog Series 4 of 4

Blog
Welcome to the final installment of the Innovations in Healthcare Global Health Innovation Grantees blog series.  History of the Global Health Innovation Grants Program Since 2016, The Pfizer Foundation’s Global Health Innovation Grants (GHIG) program has supported community-based initiatives that aim to improve quality of care and strengthen health systems in lower income countries. Innovations in Healthcare supports GHIG grantees by facilitating connections in the ecosystem, hosting GHIG-specific workshops and peer convenings at the Annual Forum, and conducting regular program monitoring to provide portfolio and individual results to the Pfizer Foundation. Now in its eighth year (GHIG8), 20 new recipients of the one-year grant program have each received $100,000 USD to drive innovative solutions that help address vaccine-preventable illness in their communities. Introducing Five of the Twenty 2024-2025 Grantees reach52 reach52 is a health innovator…
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Meet 5 of the Organizations Making an Impact Through the Global Health Innovation Grants Program, Blog Series 3 of 4

Meet 5 of the Organizations Making an Impact Through the Global Health Innovation Grants Program, Blog Series 3 of 4

Blog
Welcome to the third installment of the Innovations in Healthcare Global Health Innovation Grantees blog series.  History of the Global Health Innovation Grants Program Since 2016, The Pfizer Foundation’s Global Health Innovation Grants (GHIG) program has supported community-based initiatives that aim to improve quality of care and strengthen health systems in lower income countries. Innovations in Healthcare supports GHIG grantees by facilitating connections in the ecosystem, hosting GHIG-specific workshops and peer convenings at the Annual Forum, and conducting regular program monitoring to provide portfolio and individual results to the Pfizer Foundation. Now in its eighth year (GHIG8), 20 new recipients of the one-year grant program have each received $100,000 USD to drive innovative solutions that help address vaccine-preventable illness in their communities. Introducing Five of the Twenty 2024-2025 Grantees Living Goods Living Goods saves…
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September 2024 Monthly Roundup

September 2024 Monthly Roundup

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The “Monthly Roundup” is a monthly newsletter dedicated to sharing the latest news from the Duke Global Health Innovation Center and Innovations in Healthcare. View the September 2024 newsletter. Subscribe to the monthly newsletter.
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Meet 5 of the Organizations Making an Impact Through the Global Health Innovation Grants Program, Blog Series 2 of 4

Meet 5 of the Organizations Making an Impact Through the Global Health Innovation Grants Program, Blog Series 2 of 4

Blog
Welcome to the second installment of the Innovations in Healthcare Global Health Innovation Grantees blog series. Access the first blog here.  History of the Global Health Innovation Grants Program Since 2016, The Pfizer Foundation’s Global Health Innovation Grants (GHIG) program has supported community-based initiatives that aim to improve quality of care and strengthen health systems in lower income countries. Innovations in Healthcare supports GHIG grantees by facilitating connections, hosting program-specific workshops and peer convenings at the Annual Forum while also conducting regular program monitoring to provide portfolio and individual results to the Pfizer Foundation. Now in its eighth year (GHIG8), 20 new recipients have each received a USD $100,000 one-year grant to drive innovative solutions that help address vaccine-preventable illness in their communities. Introducing Five of the Twenty 2024-2025 Grantees Friendship Bridge Friendship…
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