Episode 24 · International
Digital innovation in humanitarian settings
Javier Elkin · Former Head of Digital Health, ICRC
Feb 2026
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About this episode
How does an organisation like the ICRC - working in conflict zones, disasters, and last-mile settings across the world - approach digital transformation? Javier Elkin spent three years building the ICRC's digital health unit from scratch. He shares the prioritisation framework he developed, two landmark implementation examples (including using DHIS2 to spin up a trauma tracking system in two weeks), and the extraordinary MOOVE/Medotron initiative to validate and contextualise LLMs for humanitarian settings where 'call 911' is not a useful answer.
“Your LLM might be technically and even medically correct - but completely useless on the ground for someone in a conflict zone.”
Javier Elkin
What we cover
- 01Building a digital health unit from scratch at the ICRC - and navigating a 700 million franc financial crisis two months in
- 02The prioritization quadrant framework: strategic alignment, impact, technical alignment, and effort
- 03The Almanac in Nigeria: 413 facilities, 450,000 paediatric visits, and a phased strategic handover to the Nigerian Ministry of Health that led to national scale-up
- 04DHIS2 in a conflict escalation: spinning up a trauma centre monitoring form in two weeks using existing open source infrastructure
- 05The MOOVE initiative: Massive Online Open Validation Evaluation for contextualising LLMs in humanitarian settings
- 06Why 'dial 911' is technically correct but has zero value in a conflict zone - and how to build AI that gives actually useful answers
- 07Medotron: retraining open source LLMs on medical data and validating them with field clinicians via a humanitarian validathon
- 08The three phases of responsible AI deployment: external validation, silent move (AI in parallel with humans), true move with clinical outcomes
- 09Honest reflections on the humanitarian sector: the crisis of trust, why the values aren't enough anymore, and what needs to change
About the guest
Javier Elkin
Former Head of Digital Health, ICRC
Javier Elkin spent three years as Head of Digital Health at the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), where he built the digital health unit from scratch and developed a portfolio spanning clinical decision support, pharmacy stock management, physical rehabilitation digitisation, telehealth, and AI evaluation. Previously he was at WHO's Department of Digital Health and Innovation under Alain Labrique, serving as product owner for the WHO's Facebook Messenger chatbot (2 million users), and at Unitaid. He has a PhD in neuroscience and was raised across seven countries by UN human rights lawyers.
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