NextBillion.net | Development Through Enterprise

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NextBillion Health Care is a blog and a news resource dedicated to addressing the myriad challenges and solutions in delivering health care to the base of the pyramid. The site, part of the NextBillion network, focuses on the best practices of social enterprises, health practitioners, large health systems, NGOs and multinational players, such as drug companies, supply chain systems and technology developers. It also examines public policy solutions for improving the health outcomes for low-income people around the world.

Sponsored by NextBillion’s Content Partner, Anavo Global LLC, NextBillion Health Care explores new thinking and action that ultimately improves people’s health, while doing so in a financially sustainable way.

Here are just a few of our main topic areas:

Rural health care delivery
Urban challenges
Innovative business models that improve access, affordability and sustainability.
Public-private partnerships
Supply chain management and efficiency
Improvements in patient care, vaccinations, procedures, and billing
Improvements in health care insurance
Management practices for social enterprises, e.g. retaining strong talent, attracting investors/financing, overall tips and tactics for managing an enterprise focused on health care
Technology: Diagnostic tools that improve health outcomes.

With NextBillion Health Care, our goal is to highlight both market-based approaches as they relate to driving change within large-scale institutions. In other words, it’s not one model versus the other, but how to bring the efficiency of markets and the scale of public systems to affect the most people.

James Militzer serves as editor for the new blog. James is an accomplished writer and editor, and has been immersed in the health care system as a professional translator for several years. He can be reached via email: jamesmil@umich.edu.

Follow NextBillion Health Care on Twitter @NextBillionHC.

Thursday, May 16, 2013

Franchising Family Planning: Janani finds success - and challenges - in rural India

By Robert Hecht

India is the site of a large share of global unmet need for contraception, with up to 23 percent of couples lacking family planning methods in some states. Janani, an NGO, is partnering with the Indian government to address this problem. It offers contraceptives and low-cost, high-quality reproductive health services through a combination of social marketing and franchising. Robert Hecht of Results for Development visited the group and discusses its work.

Monday, May 13, 2013

Where Does Innovation Meet Scale?: Leveraging cross-sector collaborations to expand impact

By Blair Miller

How can the innovation of the social enterprise sector meet the scale of the World Bank, USAID, the United Nations, or emerging market governments? This collision has the potential to create new systems, shatter old ones, and ultimately make us more effective and efficient at delivering products and services to the poor. Blair Miller explores some promising cross-sector collaborations - and the opportunities they signify for social enterprise.

Thursday, May 09, 2013

At Long Last: Is mental health poised to take its place on the global health agenda?

By James Militzer — WDI

Mental illness is a taboo that extends across cultures - and that stigma is one reason it has traditionally been an afterthought in global health discussions. But there’s a growing sense that this may be changing. As mental health seems poised to emerge as a major priority on the global health agenda, we've assembled this series of video presentations and interviews with global mental health practitioners, researchers and advocates.

Wednesday, May 08, 2013

One Step Closer to Ending Malaria: Public-private partnerships tap the potential of synthetic anti-malarial treatment

By Steve Davis

PATH and its partners in the public and private sector recently began producing a new synthetic version of artemisinin, the key ingredient in the gold-standard malaria treatment. This promises to bolster the existing botanical supply and meet approximately one-third of the global demand. According to PATH CEO Steve Davis, this milestone shows the strength of collaboration across the public and private sectors to advance science for the benefit of global health.

Monday, May 06, 2013

The Accidental Social Enterprise: VSee's unexpected foray into BoP health care

By James Militzer — WDI

Milton Chen founded VSee to provide a fully encrypted, low bandwidth alternative to Skype. But his video conferencing and screen share application was soon adopted by BoP health care providers, which now represent a growing portion of the company's business. In this post, Chen describes how VSee has catered to this unexpected market through a suite of innovative telemedicine tools.