The BID Initiative is featured in the most recent issue (December 2018) of the MMS Bulletin #148 "Digital Health - A Blessing or Curse for Global Health."

• "Marrying engineering with health policy to bring digital health to scale," by Steven C. Uggowitzer, Sima C. Newell, Dykki Settle, Alice Liu and David J. Hagan. 

  Just as medical doctors take the Hippocratic Oath as they graduate into their profession, so do many engineers solemnly promise to carry out work to the highest quality, recognizing that any errors may put lives at stake. Given this sharing of fundamental values, engineering is a profession that could be leveraged even further towards public health information systems to address opportunities created by the fusion of the early and relatively informal eHealth and mHealth paradigms into the more mature and complex one that is Digital Health. Recently, the World Health Assembly (WHA) adopted a key resolution on Digital Health, urging member states to assess and prioritise the scale-up of the implementation of digital technologies towards the “universal access to health for all”(WHA 71.1, 2018). For the full article, visit the MMS Bulletin.

• "The challenges of implementing a data use culture," by Hassan Mtenga, Dr. Alex Mphuru, Dawn Seymour, and Laurie Werner. 

  To increase coverage and equity of routine immunization services, the government of Tanzania is strengthening the data use culture through the implementation of a package of data quality and use interventions, including an electronic immunization registry, for immunization service delivery. Three key phases for achieving scale as a government-owned model emerged during the implementation: user-centered design and testing, PATH-led implementation, and government-led implementation with scale-up. A combination of factors contributed to achieving a government-owned model of implementation and ultimately showed significant time and cost savings, as well as greater ownership and ability to sustain and scale the interventions. For the full article, visit the MMS Bulletin.

Other articles in the MMS Bulletin #148 can be found here.