The 2019 IDM Annual Symposium covered a wide range of topics. Multiple talks focused on understanding health seeking behavior and trends in maternal, newborn, and child health (MNCH). Talks about health economics, social and behavioral analysis, policy, social science, disease burden, and mortality reduction with Azithromycin were discussed.
Malarial resistance, mortality, genetics, and a framework for interventions were covered. Tuberculosis talks on POC diagnostics and detection, global burden, and the introduction of PPA (Patient Pathway Analysis) tool were presented. HIV talks covered phylodynamics, trends and predictions, and geographical linkage. Measles surveillance and response was also discussed.
IDM’s modeling tools and technologies were covered, including tool calibration and analysis, machine learning and artificial intelligence, and statistics and mathematics. The new tool, EasyVA (Easy Verbal Autopsy), was introduced. In addition, related talks on cause of death in rural Africa and identifying cause of death at scale were discussed.