Dr Rajnish Joshi

Rajnish belongs to MGIMS class of 1992. He obtained MD (Internal Medicine) from his alma mater in 2003. These formative years at Sevagram shaped his interest in clinical medicine, and sensitized him in clinical epidemiology. He served the institute initially as a research associate in a Fogarty funded project, and thereafter as a junior faculty in the department. The same year saw the dawn of digitization of hospital records at MGIMS, an institute that was an early adopter of information technology in healthcare. Rajnish contributed to this transition from paper-based to electronic record system, by coordinating this change.

In 2005, he secured Fogarty fellowship to obtain his Masters in Public Health (MPH) from the School of Public Health, University of California at Berkeley (UCB). Back in Sevagram the next year, he worked on various clinical studies, including evaluation of acute-encephalitis syndrome in adults, serial gamma-interferon levels in health-care workers, and evaluation of a unique health-insurance system at MGIMS. All these projects, published in high-ranking journals, contributed to evidence.

In 2009, he completed his PhD in Public Health from UCB. In 2009-10, NHLBI-NIH-United Health funded a Global Non-Communicable disease initiative, which placed MGIMS among select institutes in the country on a Global NCD-map. Rajnish led a multi-centric primary-prevention randomized control trial, funded by this initiative, to evaluate if non-physician health-care workers in rural areas could help prevent cardiovascular diseases.

In 2011, he took a pause from his clinical responsibilities to work for a year in establishing better care systems with respect to Tuberculosis, Visceral Leishmaniasis, childhood diarrhoeas and pneumonias in rural Bihar. This was an infectious disease initiative funded by Bill and Melinda Gates foundation. This experience sensitized him to realities of clinical care delivery in many far-flung rural areas of the country, in much worse shape as compared to rural Vidarbha.

In 2013, after spending a year as a faculty in Medicine at Sikkim Manipal, he was chosen as a faculty at All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Bhopal. As Professor and head of the Department at AIIMS, he has been thickly involved in development of the Department since its inception. He teaches medicine to undergraduate and post-graduate students, and carries out hospital and community-based research. He is also involved in capacity building training related to non-communicable diseases, and supporting the public health infrastructure in the state of Madhya Pradesh.

Philately (the collection and study of postage stamps) and medicine may appear to be completely unrelated subjects. Rajnish has brought them together. Of late, he has displayed his personal collection of postal stamps on an artfully designed website. The collection includes the study of history, art and science, a celebration of landmark achievements or discoveries.

With over 14000 citations, H-Index 40 and i10- index 75, Rajnish has an impeccable research record.