Welcome, Blen Gebremeskel, MD!

Please join us in welcoming Blen Gebremeskel, MD, who is UCSF CODEX's new project intern for the summer. Dr. Gebremeskel brings a unique blend of clinical experience, healthcare operations expertise, and public health training to our team.

We sat down with Blen to learn more about her journey, her excitement about joining CODEX, and what drives her commitment to improving healthcare systems for better patient outcomes.

__

Can you tell us a little about yourself?
I'm originally from Ethiopia, where I trained and worked as a physician and a researcher. Over time, I became drawn to how health systems work behind the scenes, which led me to work in healthcare operations in Los Angeles at a primary care practice. There, I helped coordinate care, track quality metrics, and improve workflows, which further led me to pursue my master’s in public health at UC Berkeley, which I am doing currently.

My concentration is health policy and management, and I'm especially interested in how systems-level decisions impact diagnostic accuracy and patient safety. That is what drew me to CODEX as well.

What most inspires, excites, or interests you about joining CODEX this summer?
CODEX brings together everything I care about. There's diagnostic accuracy, systems change, health equity, and health policy. And I'm very interested in this intersection of clinical medicine and quality of care. So I'm very excited about how CODEX approaches diagnosis as this complex, system-wide process rather than just a single clinical moment. That perspective felt really fresh, bold, and timely as well when I heard about it initially. So, that's what drew me to do this internship at CODEX. And I feel really lucky to learn and contribute to that space.

How do you hope this internship will contribute to your career growth?
It relates to my background from my time practicing medicine in limited resource settings. And then fast forward to working in healthcare operations in the US. All these system-level issues—I've seen how they could delay the diagnosis and harm patients. So, like I said, I'm very interested in how CODEX is tackling those problems head-on. That makes it a very perfect place for me to grow. And I see my career path moving forward towards work that combines clinical medicine, systems improvement, and policy.

After finishing my degree, I want to be a primary care physician who emphasizes these problems that CODEX is tackling. So that's how I see this internship helping me with my career path moving forward.

Can you tell me about a project that you've worked on that you're particularly proud of?
A recent project that I worked on was a research project in collaboration with some PhD students from the computer science department at UC Berkeley. It was a paper titled, “Viability of Machine Translation for Healthcare in Low-Resourced Languages.” We studied how tools like Google Translate can introduce serious clinical risks when used in medical settings. And we specifically used it for low-resource languages, like Amharic and Tigrigna, which are languages spoken in Ethiopia.

I helped analyze where and why these tools failed and found out where they failed. Our findings were quite interesting. Overall, it made us realize just how language and technology can impact diagnostic accuracy and patient safety. So that's something I'm particularly proud of.

Is there anything else you'd like to add about yourself?
I'm pretty new to the Bay Area, so outside of work and school, I like exploring the area. I enjoy jazz and photography, and I'm a big fan of historical fiction biographies. I go to parks and get lost in those books. They keep me grounded in different perspectives. So outside of work, those are a few hobbies that I enjoy.