Following our recent announcement regarding the CodeYAA Influencer Award, we are thrilled to share the inspiring story behind this year’s winner. The award goes to Diana Nabunje Lubega, a visionary Ugandan engineer and digital health innovator whose work is bridging the critical gap in healthcare for some of the most vulnerable populations.
Diana, a Project Manager at MRT IT PEAKS LIMITED, leads the development of mPallCare, a project that stands as a testament to how digital tools—when designed with humility—can solve real-world problems and restore dignity.
Trainers teaching Health workers at St Francis Nsambya Hospital
The Challenge: Dignity in Low-Resource Settings
Palliative care is fundamentally about dignity, compassion, and relief from suffering. However, for millions of people living with life-limiting illnesses in low-resource settings, particularly across Africa, access to timely care remains a significant challenge.
In Uganda, providers often rely on fragmented paper records and phone calls to track patients. With health workers overstretched and patients living far from facilities, many families are left to struggle silently with unmanaged pain and distress.
The Solution: mPallCare
To address this gap, Diana and her team developed mPallCare, a mobile and web-based digital platform designed specifically to support palliative care delivery in resource-constrained and humanitarian settings.
What sets mPallCare apart is its user-centric design:
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Co-designed with Experts: Built alongside frontline clinicians, policymakers, and palliative care organizations.
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Built for Reality: It works offline, supports multiple languages, and adapts to the actual workflows of community and facility-based care.
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Better Coordination: It enables health workers to document assessments, monitor symptoms, and coordinate care teams effectively.
Impact in the Field
Since 2024, mPallCare has been piloted in collaboration with the African Palliative Care Association (APCA), the Ministry of Health, and the University of Leeds.
The feedback from the field has been powerful. Health workers reported that the tool improved the visibility of patient needs, allowing them to respond earlier to pain, breathlessness, and psychosocial distress. Most importantly, patients and caregivers expressed that they felt “seen” and followed up on, even when physical visits were difficult.
A Message from the Winner: Diana Nabunje Lubega
Reflecting on the recognition from CodeYAA, Diana shared what this award means for her and the wider community:
“Winning the Influencer Award is deeply meaningful, not just as personal recognition, but as acknowledgment that palliative care and the voices of patients, caregivers, and frontline workers deserve greater visibility in global health conversations.”
mPallCare Trainers training health workers at Mulago Hospital
Looking Ahead
The journey does not stop here. As mPallCare moves into its next phase, Diana’s focus is on strengthening data quality, improving usability, and integrating with national health systems for long-term scale-up. The team is also exploring the responsible use of analytics to identify unmet needs earlier while maintaining privacy and trust.
We congratulate Diana Nabunje Lubega on this well-deserved achievement. Her work reinforces a simple truth: technology only matters when it is grounded in lived experience and designed to serve humanity.
