About Intelligent Systems for Health

Intelligent Systems for Health (ISH) is a nonprofit research group based in Bangladesh, dedicated to implementation science, health-systems research, and the evaluation of health technologies.

Why implementation matters

Technological capability alone does not establish that an intervention will work reliably in everyday services. Our central question is how useful health technologies and evidence-based interventions can be adapted to established workflows, supported by trained staff, evaluated, and sustained within Bangladesh's health and public-service infrastructure.

Research in Bangladesh's health systems

We examine differences between urban and rural settings and the practical conditions faced by organisations, workers, and communities. Our research priorities are:

• Workforce and training: staffing and manpower requirements, training design, capability building, and implementation quality.
• Adoption and access: compatibility with established workflows, barriers to adoption, usability, and equitable access.
• Infrastructure and resources: readiness, resource requirements, budget constraints, and operational feasibility.
• Evaluation and sustainability: costs, sustained performance, and the conditions needed for scale; cost-effectiveness where evidence permits.

From technology to reliable services

Through implementation research and applied evaluation, we study how digital health tools, diagnostics, decision-support systems, data systems, and AI-enabled technologies can fit established services. We aim to understand how implementation conditions affect reliability and what evidence is needed to assess effects on service delivery and health outcomes.

This includes comparing implementation alternatives from technical, operational, economic, and development-finance perspectives, with attention to resource requirements, economic and financial feasibility, affordability, and conditions for sustainable implementation.

Research team

ISH brings together contributions spanning technology and research direction, economics and development finance, public health and implementation science, clinical mentorship, field operations, workforce development, and policy and partnerships. These complementary functions support research into how health technologies can fit established services, be staffed and financed, be adopted and evaluated, and be sustained under real-world conditions.

Meet the research and implementation team.

Leadership and previous research

S M Abdulla Al Mamun is the Principal Investigator and a Commonwealth Scholar. He leads ISH's implementation and health-technology evaluation research direction. His technical background includes AI and machine learning, medical-image research, simulation, and reproducible research software.

His previous published work includes An Interpretable Transformer-Based Approach to Classify Malaria from Blood Cell Images, in the IEEE i-COSTE 2024 proceedings. The publication's DOI record and Crossref author metadata identify him as a coauthor.

Research software and project repositories are available on his GitHub profile.