Scholars@Duke
Krishnakumar Udayakumar

Krishnakumar Udayakumar

Professor of the Practice of Global Health
Duke Global Health Institute
ku@duke.edu
310 Trent Drive, Duke Box 90519, Durham, NC 27701
310 Trent Drive, Durham, NC 27710

Scholarly Works - Journal articles

Rapid establishment of public sector COVID-19 test-and-treatment programmes across seven low- and middle-income countries: implementation strategies and program monitoring results.

Journal article BMJ global health · December 2025 The COVID-19 Treatment QuickStart Consortium worked with governments in seven low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), Ghana, Laos, Malawi, Nigeria, Rwanda, Uganda and Zambia, to implement COVID-19 test-and-treat programmes at 776 health facilities, inclu ... Full text Cite

Mixed methods implementation research of oral antiviral treatment for COVID-19 in low- and middle-income countries: a study protocol.

Journal article BMJ Open · September 18, 2025 INTRODUCTION: There is an absence of real-world evidence, especially from low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), on the implementation successes and challenges of COVID-19 Test and Treat (T&T) programmes. In 2022, nirmatrelvir/ritonavir was provided as ... Full text Open Access Link to item Cite

Development, launch, and scale-up of health products in low-income and middle-income countries: a retrospective analysis on 59 health products.

Journal article The Lancet. Global health · June 2025 BackgroundLow-income and middle-income countries (LMICs) bear a heavy burden from communicable, maternal, and childhood diseases, yet access to health products addressing these burdens is lagging. We aimed to provide empirical evidence about the t ... Full text Open Access Cite

Heart Failure in Sub-Saharan Africa: Current and Future Systems of Care

Journal article Journal of Asian Pacific Society of Cardiology · May 6, 2025 Sub-Saharan Africa is undergoing rapid demographic and epidemiological transitions, fuelled by urbanisation, lifestyle changes and ageing populations. Consequently, the continent is faced with a ballooning burden of both communicable and non-commun ... Full text Cite

Progress, impacts and lessons from market shaping in the past decade: a systematic review.

Journal article Frontiers in public health · January 2025 Market shaping activities have been increasingly used to improve access to health products, such as the advance market commitments used to increase access to the pneumococcal vaccine and COVID-19 vaccines. This paper reviewed the progress and impacts, and ... Full text Cite

African leadership is critical in responding to public health threats.

Journal article Nature communications · January 2024 Full text Cite

Scaling malaria interventions: bottlenecks to malaria elimination.

Journal article BMJ global health · November 2023 The slow progress in malaria control efforts and increasing challenges have prompted a need to accelerate the research and development (R&D), launch and scaling of effective interventions for malaria elimination. This research, including desk research and ... Full text Open Access Cite

Comparing research and development, launch, and scale up timelines of 18 vaccines: lessons learnt from COVID-19 and implications for other infectious diseases.

Journal article BMJ global health · September 2023 Over the next decade, millions of deaths could be prevented by increasing access to vaccines in low-income and middle-income countries (LMICs). The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated that the research and development (R&D), launch and scale up timelines of ... Full text Open Access Cite

Experiences, Enablers, and Challenges in Service Delivery and Integration of COVID-19 Vaccines: A Rapid Systematic Review.

Journal article Vaccines · May 2023 The COVID-19 vaccination is a crucial public health intervention for controlling the spread and severity of the SARS-CoV2 virus. COVID-19 vaccines have been developed in record time, but their deployment has varied across countries, owing to differences in ... Full text Cite

The Health Innovation Impact Checklist: a tool to improve the development and reporting of impact models for global health innovations.

Journal article Global health action · December 2022 Donor financing is increasingly relying on performance-based measures that demonstrate impact. As new technologies and interventions enter the innovation space to address global health challenges, innovators often need to model their potential impact prior ... Full text Cite

It is not too late to achieve global covid-19 vaccine equity.

Journal article BMJ (Clinical research ed.) · March 2022 Full text Cite

Integrating Data to Evaluate a Global Health Grand Challenge

Journal article Canadian Journal of Program Evaluation · January 1, 2022 This article describes the integrated, mixed methods (MM) design used to evaluate the Saving Lives at Birth (SL@B) program. SL@B is a multi-stakeholder, donor-supported global health initiative to tackle maternal and neonatal mortality via innovation. Sinc ... Full text Cite

Improving global maternal and newborn survival via innovation: Stakeholder perspectives on the Saving Lives at Birth Grand Challenge.

Journal article PloS one · January 2021 The Saving Lives at Birth (SL@B) funding partners joined in 2011 to source, support, and scale maternal and newborn health (MNH) innovations to improve maternal and newborn survival by focusing on the 24 hours around the time of birth. A multi-methods, ret ... Full text Cite

Accountable Care Reforms Improve Women's And Children's Health In Nepal.

Journal article Health affairs (Project Hope) · November 2017 Over the past decade the Ministry of Health of Nepal and the nonprofit Possible have partnered to deliver primary and secondary health care via a public-private partnership. We applied an accountable care framework that we previously developed to describe ... Full text Cite

Improving Care And Lowering Costs: Evidence And Lessons From A Global Analysis Of Accountable Care Reforms.

Journal article Health affairs (Project Hope) · November 2017 Policy makers and providers are under increasing pressure to find innovative approaches to achieving better health outcomes as efficiently as possible. Accountable care, which holds providers accountable for results rather than specific services, is emergi ... Full text Cite

Global Lessons In Frugal Innovation To Improve Health Care Delivery In The United States.

Journal article Health affairs (Project Hope) · November 2017 In a 2015 global study of low-cost or frugal innovations, we identified five leading innovations that scaled successfully in their original contexts and that may provide insights for scaling such innovations in the United States. We describe common themes ... Full text Cite

Innovations In Diabetes Care Around the World: Case Studies Of Care Transformation Through Accountable Care Reforms.

Journal article Health affairs (Project Hope) · September 2015 The rising prevalence, health burden, and cost of chronic diseases such as diabetes have accelerated global interest in innovative care models that use approaches such as community-based care and information technology to improve or transform disease preve ... Full text Cite

Translation of acute coronary syndrome therapies: from evidence to routine clinical practice.

Journal article Am Heart J · February 2015 BACKGROUND: The use of evidence-based therapies has improved the outcome of patients with acute coronary syndrome (ACS), but there is a time lag between the generation of clinical evidence and its application in routine clinical practice. We sought to quan ... Full text Link to item Cite

The MURDOCK Study: a long-term initiative for disease reclassification through advanced biomarker discovery and integration with electronic health records.

Journal article Am J Transl Res · 2012 BACKGROUND: Facing critically low return per dollar invested on clinical research and clinical care, the American biomedical enterprise is in need of a significant transformation. A confluence of high-throughput "omic" technologies and increasing adoption ... Link to item Cite

The need for transformative innovation in hypertension management.

Journal article Am Heart J · September 2011 Despite multiple available effective therapies for hypertension, many patients with high blood pressure in the United States are not adequately controlled. This inability to effectively manage hypertension can be attributed to patient, provider, and system ... Full text Link to item Cite

Perspective: global medicine: opportunities and challenges for academic health science systems.

Journal article Acad Med · September 2011 Globalization is having a growing impact on health and health care, presenting challenges as well as opportunities for the U.S. health care industry in general and for academic health science systems (AHSSs) in particular. The authors believe that AHSSs mu ... Full text Link to item Cite

Training the next generation of physician-executives: an innovative residency pathway in management and leadership.

Journal article Acad Med · May 2011 The rapidly changing field of medicine demands that future physician-leaders excel not only in clinical medicine but also in the management of complex health care enterprises. However, many physicians have become leaders "by accident," and the active culti ... Full text Link to item Cite

Lessons from India in organizational innovation: a tale of two heart hospitals.

Journal article Health Aff (Millwood) · 2008 Recent discussions in health reform circles have pinned great hopes on the prospect of innovation as the solution to the high-cost, inadequate-quality U.S. health system. But U.S. health care institutions-insurers, providers, and specialists-have ceded lea ... Full text Link to item Cite

Economic effects of prolonged clopidogrel therapy after percutaneous coronary intervention.

Journal article J Am Coll Cardiol · February 1, 2005 OBJECTIVES: This study examined the incremental cost-effectiveness of extending clopidogrel therapy from one month to one year after percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) in an unselected, heterogeneous patient population. BACKGROUND: Clinical trials su ... Full text Link to item Cite