As an epidemiologist, I use numbers to illustrate the health of a village, country or continent. But numbers can fail to truly illustrate the impact and real-life toll that preventable diseases like malaria, HIV and TB take around the globe.As an example, in my daily commute in Zambia, I drove past a local cemetery. When I first arrived in Zambia, the graves were as far as 50 meters away from the main road. Ten years later, the graves now nearly border the road. This very high and tangible death rate, often caused by preventable disease, is one of the many factors which continues to motivate me to bring public health science to the ground. My passion - to see those ‘last mile’ communities be reached with health resources - led to co-founding @Akros, an organization which aims to address preventable disease through smart and contextual use of technology and data to drive health impact. At @Akros, we bring scientific and digital innovation to the ground to make an impact on people's lives. We employ a ‘boots on the ground’ approach steeped in local knowledge and through direct work with Ministries of Health and the communities they serve. Some of the work I am most proud of has led to health interventions being delivered to the last mile. For example, use of “spatial intelligence” to build and provide health workers with paper and digital maps that assist them to find and deliver health services to villages that before were not even known to exist. Or development of a program, now WHO policy, to upskill community health workers to bring malaria services to rural communities. The measured impact of our work also comes in the form of numbers: 2,500,000 new users of sanitation over 36 months; reduction of malaria prevalence from 30% to 4% through optimized surveillance interventions. Certainly these are all impressive figures - but the real wins are what those numbers mean for each person whose life has been positively impacted. Fewer school dropouts or missed work days due to malaria means financial security and education gains. Access to latrines, soap and water means less diarrheal disease and child stunting. These wins are personal, they are for real people. Their lives have improved and paths out of poverty have been created. The innovations and deployments I have contributed to alongside my colleagues at Akros, as well as governments and partners, have not been rocket science. But they have been rooted in an understanding of local context, have addressed salient issues, and have contributed to bringing health and well being to those in need.