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In a recent episode of the Global Perspectives on Digital Health podcast, Dr. Joshua Bress speaks with Dr. Shubs Upadhyay about the origins of NoviGuide and what it has taken to move from an early idea to an innovation used nearly 500,000 times.
At the center of the story is a decision the team made early on. If you are trying to address a problem as large as child mortality, the tool has to be something that the busiest nurses in the world, with some encouragement, would choose to reach for on their own. In Dr. Upadhyay’s words, NoviGuide had to solve the vexing clinical problem while also ‘delighting’ the nurse.
The story begins in Goma, Democratic Republic of the Congo, where Dr. Joshua Bress worked as a pediatrician at HEAL Africa Hospital between 2011 and 2012. Watching expert Congolese nurses train others in their community, he noticed a pattern: hands-on techniques stuck and improved with repetition, while more knowledge-based skills, like antibiotic dosing, were quickly forgotten or began to drift as nurses rotated and new staff came on. He later reflected that it felt similar to his first day of medical school, when a professor told the incoming class, “here you will forget more things than most people ever learn.”
Nurses were, and remain, central to how the tool has evolved. Their feedback and insights continue to shape it. The harder question is what happens as that relationship scales. How do you preserve that connection while expanding across sites and countries? How do local clinical leaders take ownership and drive innovations to new heights? And how do you adapt to different national guidelines without creating something that is too complex or too costly to maintain?
To find out, tune into the podcast here:
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