Gina Lagomarsino

A Growing Network of Global Health Innovators: CHMI announces new partners and strategy to scale up cutting-edge health care solutions

We are excited to announce the Center for Health Market Innovations’ expanded network of regional partners. These organizations are working to catalyze the scale-up, replication, and improvement of innovative health care delivery programs in their regions.

CHMI will be working with organizations in Nigeria, India, Pakistan, the Philippines, Kenya, and other countries in East and Southern Africa to identify promising programs and connect innovators to funders, policymakers, or others who can help them scale up, replicate, or improve on their organization. Our expanded network includes:

Activities will vary, as partners will tailor them to suit the priorities of their countries and regions. Some will convene health care leaders running high-potential business models, like primary care chains or telemedicine franchises, while others will facilitate communication between private health care leaders and policymakers to initiate better cooperation between the public and private sectors. Still others will build relationships between non-profits and donors so health care organizations can grow and scale up their activities.

These partners are also striving to help promising health care models leap across borders. They are keen to broker partnerships between health care managers in one country, and policymakers or other partners in another country to adapt a solution from one setting to another.

What do we mean by a “health market innovation”?

CHMI partners, NextBillion Health Care

What is truly innovative in health care today? I’ll let my colleague from the Philippines field this one!

When recently asked what he meant by “innovation,” Oscar Picazo, an economist with the Philippine Institute for Development Studies (PIDS) in Manila said, “We’re working with programs that are path-breaking—when you read about them, they grab you by the collar.”

Two examples PIDS has identified are the fast-growing Generics Pharmacy franchise network and the new but promising Mother Bles Birthing Clinics, a partnership between private midwives and governments aimed at improving maternal health in remote areas.

Above: Oscar Picazo, of PIDS in the Philippines, listens to Ikram Khan, who works in Bihar, India, for ACCESS Health International.

Over the past three years, PIDS has convened health care innovators, academics, researchers and policymakers to discuss and debate emerging innovations and determine how they can be incorporated into broader health care strategies.

CHMI Partners

Across the network, CHMI’s regional partners will be helping policymakers better harness private providers to achieve national health priorities. ACCESS Health International, a longtime CHMI partner, will focus on facilitating public-private partnerships in several Indian states.

“Health is becoming a political issue in India,” said Prabal Singh, ACCESS’s Director of Research. “Indian states want to replicate models they’re hearing about,” he said, “because people are demanding better access to health care.”

Right: (from left) Shola Molemodile of Nigeria, Elizabeth Mwashuma of Kenya, and Carol Mothupi Mamothena, of Tanzania at a recent CHMI network event in Bangalore.

Offering a pipeline of promising solutions for global partners

These organizations—which, with other local CHMI partners, cover more than 20 countries—will also identify innovative non-profits, social enterprises, public-private partnerships, and policies affecting the private sector. This information will expand the data on CHMI’s digital platform, recently recognized in the Stanford Social Innovation Review as the “best single aggregate [data] source” on private sector health care programs.

In addition to our regional partners, CHMI also uses global partnerships to connect programs profiled on this platform to opportunities. For innovative programs keeping their profiles up-to-date and reporting results, CHMI provides increased visibility in competitions, on fundraising platforms, and through mentorship networks run by collaborators such as the International Partnership for Innovative Healthcare Delivery(IPIHD), and Global Giving.

Healthier communities where the private sector predominates

These partnerships—between donors and non-profits, social enterprises and impact investors, private companies and governments—will support the scale-up and improvement of CHMI-profiled programs.

Because the health system in many low- and middle-income countries is dominated by private providers, often unorganized and delivering a wide variety of services with little government oversight, the impact of partnerships formed through CHMI will be that people in these countries will have better access to quality, affordable health care.

We invite entrepreneurs, investors, NGO leaders, and others in the NextBillion community to connect with CHMI’s regional partners and health care leaders on CHMI’s LinkedIn Group.

Stayed tuned for more news from CHMI including the launch of our new digital platform—coming soon!

Editor’s note: this post was originally published on CHMI’s blog. It is republished with permission.

Categories
Health Care, Social Enterprise
Tags
public health, public-private partnerships, social enterprise