Page 128 - SAMRC AnnualReport 2025-26

Dr Wanga Zembe-Mkabile with President Cyril
Ramaphosa during the delivery of the first
ever report on global inequality to Health Systems team at the SA AIDS
G20 leaders. conference.

Overall, HSRU staff facilitated or hosted lectures, GELA’s four country-specific recommendations on
workshops and webinars during the reporting newborn and child-health priorities were published
period. PhD and Masters students graduated under in a transparent and digitally accessible format
this unit's supervision. through the innovative MAGICapp platform.
In terms of public outreach, staff participated in Another initiative is the Integrated eHealth Study,
9 broadcast media interviews, produced 2 blogs, which focuses on co-creating a unified digital
1 video, and 1 podcast for social media platforms, platform to support information sharing and linkage
and authored 21 print media articles. to care for youth sexual and reproductive health and
mental-health concerns.
AI in Medical and Health Research
HSRU is also involved in implementing NoviGuide,
The PAMHoYA Project was launched in 2025 as a a clinical decision-support platform that translates
pioneering mental-health data science initiative evidence-based clinical guidelines into structured
on the African continent. The project addresses digital pathways to guide healthcare workers through
the need for large-scale, standardised datasets to patient assessment, diagnosis, and treatment, with
improve the accuracy and representativeness of a focus on STIs. The platform combines AI-enabled
mental-health research among young people and decision logic with real-time data capture and
to reduce existing research gaps by pooling and analytics.
harmonising South African datasets.
The unit’s research further highlights the growing
The E2D Collaboration is also exploring data- role of mobile-health technologies in supporting
driven technologies to strengthen evidence- healthcare delivery. A recent study found that the
informed decision-making through the integration informal use of messaging applications by healthcare
of AI-supported tools for evidence synthesis and workers in South Africa is widespread and should be
the piloting of a REDCap database to support an considered in the development of national digital
evidence-response service. These innovations health strategies.
are improving efficiency, strengthening reviewer-
capacity management and enabling real-time
tracking of review progress.

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