Global Health Labs (GH Labs) – a nonprofit organization fully funded by Gates Ventures (the private office of Bill Gates) and concluding operations at the end of 2025 – partnered with the Gates Foundation and other organizations to accelerate the development of health technology solutions for underserved populations, especially in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). As part of this mission, GH Labs began to create a primary health care (PHC) equipment knowledge repository. What is documented in this site represents a beginning effort meant to catalyze further work to more comprehensively address PHC equipment needs in LMICs. It captures GH Labs’ insights and findings across four key health areas: cervical cancer, obstetric ultrasound, respiratory distress syndrome, and tuberculosis. The repository was last updated in July 2025.
Primary Health Care is Central to Improving Public Health Outcomes
Primary health care (PHC) is a set of services meant to meet most of a person’s health needs throughout their lifetime. In LMICs, people’s first interaction with a trained health care worker is typically through PHC. For individuals, families, and communities, this sets the stage for care seeking over a lifetime.
Each PHC service consists of a package of comprehensive, integrated care that spans health promotion, disease prevention, treatment, and care. These packages of care can be organized differently by country.
A seamless cascade of care, beginning with high-quality PHC, saves lives and improves wellbeing. Health care in India, for instance, is organized as a cascade of care. It typically begins near patients in their communities (community health outreach, PHC sub-center) and continues through higher level facilities (PHC center, secondary-level center, district hospital). Near-patient PHC is provided by community health workers and nurse-midwives. They screen patients and refer them onwards to a PHC center. There, doctors diagnose and treat patients, referring them when necessary for secondary or tertiary care.
Technology Innovation for Primary Health Care
PHC can reduce health inequities by reaching the most vulnerable people, and it can efficiently use health system resources to serve more people more quickly. GH Labs focused on technology solutions to ensure quick and accurate triage at the PHC level: determining which patients need referral to facilities providing higher levels of care and which patients can be effectively treated nearer the local community.
GH labs and partners identified gaps in care that could be addressed by technology innovation and began to develop solutions for these gaps. The goal was to empower near-patient care providers to effectively screen and refer patients, and to empower doctors to effectively diagnose, treat, and refer patients. Technologies were co-developed whenever possible with partners in the countries where they will be used, ensuring they are effective, appropriate, and sustainable.
GH Labs’ Technical Knowledge Repository
This knowledge repository documents technology solutions developed by GH Labs and others for key PHC challenges. All repository content is in the context of PHC in LMIC settings, unless otherwise noted, and it builds from the context of health service delivery in India, which was a priority country for GH Labs. The repository was last updated in July 2025.
The knowledge repository is organized into four topics. Each health topic falls under one of the PHC services in India (indicated in parentheses): cervical cancer (non-communicable disease care), obstetric ultrasound (maternal health care), respiratory distress syndrome (neonatal and infant health care), and tuberculosis (communicable disease care). Each health topic is divided into three sub-sections: the first offers context about the disease (or health condition in the case of obstetric ultrasound); the second explores the patient experience; and the third focuses on equipment used across the continuum of care, including current technologies and ongoing innovations. This third sub-section also presents structured insights in the form of technology solution tables—comprehensive for some topics and representative examples for others.
The repository includes key GH Labs’ technology innovations: screening devices for cervical pre-cancer detection to enable screen-and-treat programs to stop the progression of HPV infection to cervical cancer, innovation for a low-cost point-of-care ultrasound (POCUS) tool usable by non-medical personnel without extensive training to support clinical decision making for antenatal care to reduce neonatal mortality and maternal mortality, innovation for a neonatal Continuous Positive Airway Pressure (CPAP) device that addresses the burden of respiratory distress syndrome across LMIC contexts, and innovation for rapid and accurate diagnosis of TB and drug resistance at the point of patient care to enable timely treatment and reduce TB transmission.