Dr. Miriam Rabkin is the director for Health Systems Strategies at ICAP, where she focuses on strengthening health systems, improving access to health services in resource-limited settings, and the design, delivery, and evaluation of chronic care programs for HIV and non-communicable diseases. The “implementation gap” between the discovery of effective health interventions and their delivery at scale can take years – or decades. Dr. Rabkin’s focus on implementation science and service delivery has helped the scale-up of essential programs throughout Africa and in the Middle East, Central Asia, and Southeast Asia.
As a physician treating people with HIV/AIDS, Dr. Rabkin became deeply concerned about the problem of inadequate access to health services and recognized that public health strategies were key. Pursuing her MPH at the Columbia Mailman School, she was part of the original MTCT-Plus initiative that grew into ICAP and has been working with Wafaa El-Sadr and ICAP for the past 20 years, expanding domestic and global access to care through delivery science.
Along with a portfolio of research projects, Dr. Rabkin leads ICAP’s 21-country HIV Coverage, Quality, and Impact Network (CQUIN), a learning network designed to accelerate the implementation of innovative models for HIV differentiated service delivery to meet the diverse needs and expectations of people living with HIV in Africa. The collaborative network enables peers in different countries to share the strengths of their own program delivery approaches and to exchange best practices, resources, and tools. Dr. Rabkin also leads the multi-country Quality Improvement Capacity for Impact Project (QICIP), which supports training and capacity-building for quality management of HIV programs in sub-Saharan Africa.
With the rapid onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Rabkin has been engaged in several cross-cutting projects with ICAP colleagues in other departments. These initiatives use ICAP’s established relationships with global health care systems to accelerate COVID prevention and control, including the design and implementation of a large training program to equip health care providers to face this challenge.
