Making the World a Safer Place to Live: Diwakar Mohan, MD, DrPH

“I hope that we will continue along this path of making the world safer for people to live in and living up to our school’s vision. Protecting Health, Saving Lives – Millions at a Time’ is the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health motto.”

Dr. Diwakar Mohan, a public health physician and health systems epidemiologist working with low- and middle-income countries, explains his work as “end-to-end evidence generation.” He starts with efficacy trials of innovations, moves to field-based effectiveness trials, examines their implementation through routine programs, and then evaluates to see if the program generates the expected health impact.

While Dr. Mohan started out his career as a physician, he initially wanted to a physicist. His interest in numbers and data, combined with his background as a physician, led him to a major revelation: he could do more by leveraging his skills on disease prevention at the public health level, rather than treatment at the individual level.

“Two of my biggest reasons for focusing on prevention are the principles of cost-effectiveness and humanism. Once a person becomes ill, it’s much, much more expensive to undertake all the steps in treatment and perform all the follow-ups,” he explained. “The other reason is about humanism. We prevent suffering from a disease that could potentially be avoided. To the extent that illness can possibly be prevented and lives saved, I think we have an imperative to do it from an ethical standpoint.”

Artificial Intelligence: Boon or Bust?

Dr. Mohan is part of the Center for Global Digital Health Innovation, which is based in the Department of International Health  at the Bloomberg School. He sees major potential in improving and reworking workflow processes using machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI). However, he also proclaims himself as an AI skeptic.

“I would love for digital innovations to live up to their potential, but I want to be convinced with good evidence of their impact,” he said. He explains that a common pitfall in AI and digital health is the exuberant expectations generated when an algorithm or prediction model works in the lab, without accounting for the context where it might find a use. 

“Public health, the way that I practice it, is not flashy. Progress is often three steps forward, two steps backward.” Dr, Mohan said. “I help set realistic expectations.” 

Focusing on Women & Children

Dr. Mohan is part of the International Institute for Programs, a network of multi-disciplinary researchers at the Bloomberg school, working to strengthen public health policies and programs in predominantly low-income countries.  He is, presently, evaluating a government run program to improve early childhood development in the state of Meghalaya, India. The state governmen, with a loan from the Asian Development Bank, is implementing a program that provides universal childcare to preschool children and care for their mothers and postpartum women. This program goes beyond healthcare to look at cognitive development and preschool education.

“A lot of countries are starting to realize the potential for improving their human resource capital if they invest very early in a child’s lifetime,” he said. “We are going to be evaluating this particular program, which will run for five years.”

“The state government of Meghalaya, which implements the program, is the main partner for this learning agenda,” he said. “We will work with them, to identify the best questions and how we answer them.”

“Global Health is at its zenith.”

Dr. Mohan notes that in spite of the recent shocks, global health is at its zenith if one were to take a view over the past few centuries. “Public health took off in the late 18th century, when people started to realize the importance of a healthy population. “With increasing globalization, we perceive a need for a unified picture of global health, rather than just a country-level focus.” 

“At this point in time, we need to think strategically about how we design the public health workforce of the future, especially in the global health arena. Improvements happen at glacial speed in public health, especially in health systems, which means we need to readjust our funding and training models” he said.

“I hope that we will continue along this path of making the world safer for people to live in and living up to our school’s vision. Protecting Health, Saving Lives – Millions at a Time’ is the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health motto.”