April 2025

We are excited to share our 2024 Program Summary, which highlights the progress and impact of the Digital Medic program. Our goal is simple: to expand knowledge, improve health outcomes, and create a more equitable world. By harnessing the power of digital tools, we provide training resources that reach people wherever they are, whether in remote villages or urban centers.

Our guiding values are collaboration, innovative learning design, and a relentless focus on community needs. This year alone, we’ve reached millions with educational content on critical topics such as maternal health, immunization, childhood illness, and mental health. The growing global demand for these resources underscores the importance of accessible, evidence-based health education.

However, we must acknowledge the increasing obstacles for global health. Health emergencies are escalating, fueled by misinformation and compounded by disparities in healthcare access, particularly in low-resource settings. The current political landscape has created further barriers to international collaboration and resource allocation.

These challenges only reinforce our commitment to finding effective solutions, innovating for change, and continuing to expand our reach. We remain steadfast in our commitment to areas like mental health education, which continues to be critically underserved.

Looking ahead, we remain focused on ensuring that frontline health workers receive the training, resources, and support they need to provide effective care. We continue to share our insights with global communities to make digital learning more impactful and accessible worldwide.

We are profoundly grateful for your continued partnership, which makes our work possible.

Sincerely,

Charles, Aarti, and the Digital Medic team

[email protected]

Annual Program Summary: What we accomplished in 2024

In 2024, we expanded the types of learning assets we delivered to communities worldwide to reach more learners with accessible tools.

We produced:

Vaccine education cards for caregivers as part of a larger immunization campaign in Mozambique, with VillageReach and the Mozambique Ministry of Health
Infographics to help mothers detect danger signs in pregnancy and for newborns in Africa, with Reach Digital Health
A series of educational videos in Spanish and Indigenous Mayan languages — aimed at addressing hesitancy about HPV and childhood immunizations — that reached over 4.1 million people in Guatemala (with Wuqu’ Kawoq | Maya Health Alliance, the University of California San Francisco Institute for Global Health Sciences, and the Guatemalan Ministry of Health)

We also continued to build our community health worker (CHW) training course library, which now includes common childhood illnesses, as well as other maternal and child health focused topics. Co-creation with our community partners is a cornerstone of how we work, and this past year we were proud to have co-created the childhood illness materials with One to One Africa, Lwala Community Alliance, and Philani Maternal, Child Health and Nutrition Trust.

Through our research, we further validated the critical role that CHWs play in our health systems and described how we can support them, as well as examining ways to improve learning during health emergencies.

Explore our 2024 Program Summary

Mental Health Education and Support: Our plans to help address a global need

Half the world’s population will experience a mental health disorder at some point in their lives
Around 15% of the world’s adolescents have a mental health condition
Lost productivity costs an estimated $1 trillion per year in depression and anxiety alone

In 2025 and beyond, mental health will be a crucial area of focus for our team. We know that the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated an existing global need for holistic health education. Our evidence-based mental health materials have already garnered over 2.5 million views, and we aim to build our mental health library to raise awareness, reduce stigma, and encourage help-seeking behaviors.

We will be creating new content on the following topics in 2025:

Community health worker mental health training: We will be working with community-based organizations in sub-Saharan Africa to create video-based training for CHWs on high-need mental health topics.
Upskilling school staff to address substance use in adolescents: We are creating a video-based online course for school counselors, teachers, and other staff on how to effectively communicate with youth about substance use and guide them to make safe and healthy choices during this critical stage of development.

New Poster Presentation and Q&A

Efforts to improve childhood vaccination rates in Guatemala and Kenya

CUGH poster presentation

The Digital Medic evaluation team presented two posters at the Consortium of Universities for Global Health (CUGH) conference in Atlanta in February. Our posters described initiatives to support community health workers as educators, with the goal of improving childhood vaccination rates in Guatemala (collaborating with UCSF Institute for Global Health Sciences and Wuqu' Kawoq | Maya Health Alliance) and Kenya (collaborating with Lwala Community Alliance and Dimagi).

Pictured: Nadia Hemmat, collaborating doctoral student at University of California, San Diego, explaining our findings (faculty mentor: Victoria Ward, clinical associate professor of pediatrics at Stanford Medicine and medical director at Digital Medic).

Illustration of a boy with measles, red spots on face and torso

Understanding measles, a highly infectious but preventable disease

Charles Prober, MD

With measles on the rise after an outbreak that began in Texas spread to neighboring states, Digital Medic Executive Director Charles Prober answered common questions about measles symptoms, transmission, and prevention. For instance:

How dangerous is measles for children and adults?
How contagious is measles?
How effective is the vaccine?
What is the impact of measles worldwide?

Read the Q&A with Dr. Prober

Congratulations, Community Health Impact Coalition!

Pictured on left: CHIC members in the audience (photo credit: CHIC).
Right: Dr. Madeleine Ballard and Margaret Odera accepting the award.

Elation was in the air at the Skoll World Forum when the Community Health Impact Coalition (CHIC) received the 2025 Skoll Award for Social Innovation in Oxford April 3. Digital Medic's managing director, Aarti Porwal, was honored to celebrate with collaborators from near and far.

MORE UPDATES

"Use, Adaptation, and Sharing of Massive Open Online Courses for Emergency Health on the OpenWHO Platform": Learn how health workers in low- and middle-income countries often adapt the content of massive open online courses (MOOCS) into alternative formats in order to share it. Jamie Sewan Johnston of our evaluation team is the lead author of this paper in the Journal of Medical Internet Research.

"One term to transform: universal health coverage through professional community health workers": This commentary in the Lancet from members of the Community Health Impact Coalition argues for the transformative potential of investing in community health workers' salaries and skills, effectively integrating them into the health system.

"The role and recognition of community health workers in research–a global survey": Commentary in the Lancet from the Community Health Impact Coalition research study group describes the results of a survey that confirmed that academic research often fails to meaningfully involve and recognize community health workers. It looks at barriers to inclusion and suggests participatory research models.

Many more research and health education projects are underway. Stay tuned for more Quarterly Updates to learn the latest in community health education.

HEALTH EDUCATION RESOURCES