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“Health is everybody’s business. My aim is to ensure that we are continuously pushing ourselves and striving to deliver projects that best meet the health needs of the populations today and in the future.”
Inez Mikkelsen-Lopez Health Specialist, Paci c Department; and ADB Very Innovative Person
How digital health can shrink the globe
The challenge: Provide access to quality health services in Papua New Guinea, with its large, spread out rural population.
The innovation: Introduce digital health technology to overcome the rural access barrier and work with communities to ensure technologies meet their needs.
The story: As Inez Mikkelsen-Lopez traveled to a remote project site in Papua New Guinea in 2019, she was quietly grateful that she was making the trip
in a helicopter and not for 4 hours on
a bumpy road, followed by 2 hours by canoe through crocodile-infested waters.
She thought about what to expect when she got there, to join a ground-breaking ceremony for a new rural outpost clinic. She imagined a small gathering with the local community, perhaps a site visit to the plot of land earmarked for the clinic. Instead, the helicopter was greeted by over 500 people waiting for Mikkelsen- Lopez and her team.
“People had come from all the surrounding villages. They were here to celebrate and they were excited. Clearly, I had seriously misjudged the importance of this day,” says the health specialist.
Mikkelsen-Lopez had three important realizations that day. First, the villagers were ready. The land had already been cleared and attened, and they expected ADB to be ready, too. Second, the project was, for this community, a matter of life and death. For a villager with a critical injury or a mother in labor, this was their only option for healthcare that wasn’t a
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