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Bringing the Private Sector to Public Health: How Business Innovation Can Improve Health Care Access
Engaging the private sector is an increasingly critical theme in global health, because there is no clear way to achieve universal health coverage without it. Perhaps that's why four of the five winners of the first-ever USAID Inclusive Health Access Prize are for-profit companies. Marian W. Wentworth, President and CEO of Management Sciences for Health, discusses the prize, and the movement toward private solutions to provide scalable innovation in global health.
- Categories
- Health Care
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Delivering Family Planning to Rural Customers: Are Mobile Pharmacies ‘Just What the Doctor Ordered’?
Pharmacies serve as key access points for family planning products in many emerging markets. In countries like Malawi, the number of pharmacies has ballooned by nearly 100% in the past 10 years. Yet it can be difficult to run a sustainable pharmacy business, especially in rural areas. Andrea Bare and Erika Beidelman at the William Davidson Institute discuss potential solutions – including an innovative mobile pharmacy – based on conversations with Malawian entrepreneurs.
- Categories
- Entrepreneurship, Health Care
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The Doctor Will Skype You Now: Virtual Checkups Reach Bangladesh’s Isolated Islands
Now, a new virtual medical service called Teledaktar (TD) is trying to make health care more easily accessible. Every week, TD's medical operators travel to the chars by boat, carrying a laptop, a portable printer for prescriptions and tools to run basic medical screenings such as blood pressure, blood sugar, body temperature and weight.
- Categories
- Health Care, Technology
- Region
- South Asia
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How Do You Fight Malaria In Tanzania? With Drones!
When the specially-designed DJI Agras MG1-S drone rose over a rice field in Cheju, Tanzania and started to deploy its payload, it was the culmination of years of effort towards one goal: fighting malaria. Every year in the eastern African country of Tanzania, malaria infects more than 10 million people killing 80,000 – and until now eradication efforts have been largely focused on costly and time-consuming manual spraying.
- Categories
- Health Care, Technology
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Unite Behind the Science: When it Comes to Cooking, it’s Time for ‘Clean’ to Mean Something
Nearly 3 billion people still live in homes where someone burns sticks, charcoal or dung to cook, devastating their health, their local environments and the climate. Yet thousands of projects have failed to deliver truly clean cooking to the masses, doing a disservice to customers and damaging the sector's credibility with funders. Eric Reynolds, CEO of the cookstove company Inyenyeri, argues that there's only one way to turn this around: "deliver dramatically improved outcomes, and be able to prove it." He outlines a straightforward way the industry can make that happen.
- Categories
- Energy, Environment, Health Care
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Soap Opera Could Be Unlikely Form of Birth Control in Uganda
Uganda has one of the highest birth rates in the world. It also has some of the most dedicated soap opera watchers anywhere in Africa. Now a group of enterprising Ugandans is aiming to tackle the former through the medium of the latter.
- Categories
- Health Care
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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A New Battleground: Why Health Care Companies in Low and Middle-Income Countries Will Challenge Today’s Market Leaders
There's no question that today’s low- and middle-income countries will be a major part of health care businesses' portfolios. The only question, writes Paul Clyde, president of the William Davidson Institute, is which businesses will succeed at serving these customers. With local firms in these growing markets already competing for low-income customers, Clyde argues that multinationals will need to invest, sometimes weathering losses, to stay competitive.
- Categories
- Health Care
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$14B Needed to Eliminate Uncorrected Poor Vision Worldwide, Essilor Finds
By 2050, uncorrected poor vision is predicted to reach epidemic proportions, with over 50 percent of the world’s population expected to suffer from myopia, many with serious vision-threatening side effects and drastic long-term implications, according to Essilor.
- Categories
- Health Care
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