{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"Global Perspectives on Digital Health","title":"Enhancing newborn care in rural Eastern Congo. How a tool built alongside nurses changed everything","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":4164,"description":"The most vulnerable moment in any human life is the first few hours. In this episode, Shubs talks with Dr. Josh Bress, pediatrician, President of Global Strategies and Medical Director of NoviGuide, a tool used nearly half a million times to help nurses in remote facilities across Africa manage critical newborn care. Josh shares his experiences and stories from Eastern Congo, why paper guidelines fail at the bedside, how configuration (not customization) is the key to scaling, what it actually looks like to delight frontline health workers, and what's kept his team going through 15 years of building at the last mile. Essential listening for anyone building for impact in global health.\"I'm not going to be better than these nurses. What can I do to help these nurses do their job better?\"Key takeawaysPaper guidelines end up on shelves, digital care pathways get to the bedside. Josh compares paper guidelines to an atlas and Novi Guide to Google Maps. Built right, digital can adapt to what you actually have, flow with real clinical decisions, and stay available at 3am.Configuration, not customisation, is how you scale. Everyone told Josh he'd have to rebuild NoviGuide for every country. He didn't. Clinical guidelines differ in predictable ways. The real variation is at the site level: what drugs, equipment, and diagnostics are available. Build for that and you can scale without starting from scratch.Delight your end user. Nurses turned NoviGuide into a verb. They trained others with more passion than Josh's own team could. They hit the feedback button asking for more. Treat frontline health workers as true customers, not passive recipients.Local leadership is the engine of scale. Josh has personally met fewer than a dozen of NoviGuide's users across nearly half a million uses. Scale happened because local leaders like Dr. Nakakeeto in Uganda took ownership and made the tool their own.This is practical, heartfelt and full of so much wisdom for people building,...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/hZPIZ-J0wiJx5Bagp4XUMpa5ahoYyL_sqq9C89IZlTc/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS85ODYz/N2YyYzVkYzhjMjY2/YWQyMjc4YmU3MWM0/YWE2NS5qcGc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}