Gitanjali Mishra

I've always been passionate about public health, and my background lies in dentistry. What inspired me most in dentistry was whenever I went to community health camps - that's what inspired me to go on the community level and help people, to help the community on that level, not just by seeing one individual person. That's how I was drawn more towards public health, where we can have outreach programs and cover larger populations, raising awareness about issues like HIV, hepatitis C, and other public health concerns. When I was doing my Master's in Public Health, I realized that I'm more inclined and have more interest towards data analytics. So that's how both sides - my love for public health and data analytics - just led me to public health informatics. Today, my work is all about disease surveillance, mostly data about the disease outcomes and spread, how the disease is spreading, what are the progressive areas. I worked on the COVID team in 2020 as an epidemiologist, and now I'm responsible for implementing a new electronic health record system across all 18 districts of Georgia, including 235 clinics and local health departments. We're trying to centralize all the health information - right now there is no system, every district has their own system, and some in the southern and northern areas don't even have any system, they're doing it on paper and pen. This is a very huge development, and in the entire United States of America, no state has done this so far.