Dr. Wendy Githu is a Kenyan medical doctor, digital health advocate, and health innovator currently pursuing an MSc in Health Economics and Health Policy at Brunel University London. As the Head of Telemedicine in Murang’a County, she leads a county-wide hub-and-spoke virtual care program operating across 36 sites. This initiative decentralizes chronic disease management—focusing on hypertension, diabetes, and cardiovascular conditions—to drastically reduce financial and geographical barriers to care for rural communities. Beyond county-wide digital transformation, Dr. Githu champions TeleMama, an innovative maternal and child health platform that provides continuum-of-care tracking from preconception through postnatal, newborn, and immunization follow-up. Working at the intersection of clinical medicine, health economics, and AI policy, she is dedicated to leveraging technology and data to strengthen primary healthcare systems and drive equitable Universal Health Coverage across Kenya and the broader African continent.

From Telemedicine to Intelligent Healthcare: Leveraging Data Science, Connected Technologies and AI Readiness to Transform Rural Healthcare in Kenya.                                 Rural and underserved populations in low- and middle-income countries continue to face significant barriers to quality healthcare, including geographical distance, limited specialist availability, high transportation costs and fragmented continuity of care. Telemedicine provides an opportunity to decentralize specialist services and bring healthcare closer to patients. In October 2024, Murang’a County, Kenya, implemented a government-led telemedicine programme using a hub-and-spoke model to connect rural health facilities with clinicians providing virtual consultations, initially focusing on patients living with non-communicable diseases (NCDs).The programme has since evolved beyond virtual consultations into a broader digital health ecosystem integrating electronic health records, routine clinical data, digital referrals, health analytics and connected medical devices. Building on this infrastructure, Murang’a has also developed TeleMama, a maternal and newborn digital surveillance innovation designed to follow women from preconception and pregnancy through delivery and into the first six months of a newborn’s life. Together, these initiatives demonstrate how digital health infrastructure can evolve from facilitating remote consultations towards continuous, data-driven and eventually predictive healthcare.