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More Than Credit: Can microfinance also deliver affordable health care?
Poor people should have greater demand for health coverage than any other market, but the microfinance sector has had difficulty convincing poor people to pay insurance premiums. In response, BRAC launched its own health loan pilot – the “medical treatment loan” – by partnering its microfinance and health programs in Bangladesh.
- Categories
- Education, Health Care
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‘One Foot on a Glacier and the Other on a Bullet Train’: Forum participants discuss moving mHealth toward national health system integration
With so many apps and intervention techniques available in the private and public sectors, there is now more than ever a greater focus on these applications’ abilities to integrate and work as a system. When multiple structures are integrated into a single comprehensive design, governments can plan health systems that connect electronic and mobile interventions.
- Categories
- Health Care, Technology
- Tags
- public health, scale
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Champions of the Toilet: The best way to solve open defecation, the authors say, is to focus on demand, not construction
Access to toilets doesn’t always fix the problem of open defecation; in fact, partial coverage generates insignificant health benefits. Therefore, to address India’s malnutrition and health crisis, it is important to promote widespread adoption of toilet use.
- Categories
- Education, Health Care
- Tags
- public health
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Weekly Roundup – 12/6/14: Overcoming paywalls, increasing information accessibility in the pursuit of a healthier planet
There’s been a good bit of discussion recently about the accessibility of health care information; specifically, the timely sharing of research on such topics as Ebola.
- Categories
- Health Care, Technology, Telecommunications
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NexThought Monday – Unlocking Mobile Data: Regulatory and privacy issues prevent metadata use from realizing its full potential
African countries are not data-rich environments but, because of high mobile phone use, they could be. And that data could be used to track, among other things, importation routes for infectious disease, patterns of migration or economic transactions.
- Categories
- Health Care, Technology
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Explaining pneumonia’s big global decline on a tiny budget
There appears to be a disconnect between the global burden of pneumonia and how much money is spent on attempting to reduce this burden, which Humanosphere recently summed up as: Pneumonia leads in killing children, but not in global health financing.
- Categories
- Health Care
- Tags
- public health
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The India Sterilization Tragedy: Highlighting the need for better choices, safer procedures
There is very little attention being paid to a clear, immediate reason for the danger of these sterilization procedures in India – use of un-sterilized surgical equipment.
- Categories
- Health Care
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Turning the tap on: Water as a business model
Too many people in the world don’t have access to safe drinking water in their homes. This month’s meeting of theWorld Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council in Dubai could be the first step to changing that.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Health Care
- Tags
- public health