Using Routine Health Systems Data for Data-driven COVID-19 Response
Speakers
Emma Boley, Health Monitoring, Evaluation and Informatics Lead, Partners In Health–Liberia
Isabel Fulcher, Data Science Initiative Fellow, Harvard Medical School
Dr. Fulcher is a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard Data Science Initiative and works with Dr. Bethany Hedt-Gauthier to evaluate and optimize the implementation of digital maternal health interventions in Rwanda and Tanzania. She is primarily interested in the use of innovative data science tools to improve the delivery of sexual and reproductive health care to at-risk populations. Dr. Fulcher's statistical interests include the development of causal inference methods that account for unmeasured confounding or peer effects on a network.
Recently, she has been engaged in multiple COVID-19 related projects. She and her team have developed a data processing and analysis pipeline to conduct syndromic surveillance in Liberia, Mexico, Malawi, Lesotho, Sierra Leone, Haiti, and Rwanda using routinely collected data. Dr. Fulcher is also developing sampling methods for seroprevalence studies among healthcare workers in low-resource settings.
Bethany Hedt-Gauthier, Associate Professor, Harvard Medical School
Dr. Gauthier received a BS with distinction in mathematics from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill in 1999. Immediately following her undergraduate training, she served three years in the U.S. Peace Corps in Namibia, where she was introduced to the needs and challenges of global public health and the role of research in addressing these gaps. In 2003, she began a PhD program in biostatistics at Harvard School of Public Health. During this training, Dr. Hedt-Gauthier took a leave of absence to complete a fellowship in strategic information at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Malawi. She received her PhD in 2008 and completed a two-year postdoctoral fellowship in the same department in 2010.
Jean Claude Mugunga, Deputy Chief Medical Officer, Partners In Health
Dr. Jean Claude Mugunga is deputy chief medical officer at Partners In Health (PIH), where he supports various PIH country sites and programs, assessing whether said programs are making a valuable and measurable impact. In this position, he also co-leads PIH’s Universal Health Coverage Initiative, creating a series of tools to monitor and evaluate the progressive realization of Universal Health Coverage across PIH supported countries. Dr. Mugunga received his medical degree from the University of Rwanda and a Master of Science in International Health Policy and Management from Brandeis University. He has been deeply involved in health care provision, health systems strengthening and advocacy for patients in low-income settings over the last decade. His work experience extends across different sectors and countries, and includes working as a clinician at public facilities in Rwanda and as a clinical researcher for the Overseas Development Institute, UK, before joining PIH in 2013. He also serves as a mentor for students in global health and is on the Board of Directors for GlobeMed, an international student organization headquartered in Evanston, IL with chapters at 50+ universities in the US.
