The WDI Global Impact Speaker Series kicks off for the academic year by exploring the role that good supply chains play in ensuring health products reach their intended recipients in Africa and India, how technology is making a difference and why having a motivated and dedicated staff is critical. The Oct. 4 talk featuring David Sarley, senior program officer at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (Gates Foundation), also will highlight how graduating students can make a difference in global public health.
Sarley’s talk, “Primary Health Care Supply Chain Challenges and Opportunities,” will be held at 5 p.m. in Room R2220 at the Ross School of Business. It is free and open to the public.
The WDI Global Impact Speaker Series features thought leaders and practitioners who do innovative work in low- and middle-income countries. They share their experience, provoke thought, and stimulate discussion around the opportunities and challenges of international development.
Over the last five years at the Gates Foundation, Sarley has created and managed investments across multiple delivery teams tasked with strengthening supply chains, and recently joined the Innovation and Strategy team in Vaccine Delivery.
“David has a deep understanding of the needs, opportunities and challenges that many countries face ensuring that their citizens have access to a reliable supply of lifesaving health commodities,” said Michael Krautmann, senior research associate with WDI’s Healthcare Initiative, who has worked with Sarley on Gates Foundation-funded projects. “Through his work at the foundation, David is at the forefront of technological and organizational solutions to these challenges, and his talk will be insightful for students, faculty and all those who are interested in improving global access to medicines.”
Sarley served as a program officer on a large healthcare project, “Developing a Common Vision of Effective and Efficient Global Health Supply Chains”, implemented by WDI and funded by the Gates Foundation, which had a number of sub-components.
One element of the large project was creating executive communications materials to increase global donors’ investment in supply chain, and convey key supply chain challenges and opportunities in global health. Another part of the project resulted in a WDI report, “Designing Global Health Supply Chains for the Future,” that proposed a series of initiatives that governments, global development agencies, and those in the private sector should undertake immediately in order to build supply chain capacity to anticipate these increasing demands in the coming decades.
WDI’s engagement with the Gates Foundation also studied facilitating data-driven supply chain policy decisions by developing a model that incorporates performance tradeoffs and stakeholder priorities into formal cost effectiveness analysis. And, designing and initializing a supply chain resource center in West Africa that provides direct strategy support to governments to help transform their healthcare.
Sarley has nearly 35 years experience in investment and development in emerging markets. He has worked for 15 years in public health supply chain management, including 10 years with USAID grantee John Snow Inc. (JSI) and five at the Gates Foundation. Prior to JSI, he worked in economics consultancy for 16 years in trade, transport, finance and health economics.
He was a volunteer with the United Kingdom-based Voluntary Service Overseas and started his career for Ford Motor Co. in inventory management. He has a bachelor’s degree in Econometrics from the University of Hull in England, and a graduate degree from Southampton University. He has lived in four countries and worked in over 80 countries.
Angus Deaton. (Image credit: Princeton University).
The William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan will host an Oct. 5 talk and discussion with Sir Angus Deaton, a Nobel Prize-winning economist whose work has changed how many think about both global wealth and poverty.
The event, which is free and open to the public, will take place at 4 p.m. in Robertson Auditorium at U-M’s Ross School of Business. A panel discussion will follow Deaton’s talk, which is titled “What Should We Do About Global Poverty?” The event is part of WDI’s year-long celebration of its 25th anniversary. The panel discussion will include Renuka Gadde, vice president-Global Health at Becton Dickinson; David Lam, research professor at the U-M Institute for Social Research; and Jan Svejnar, professor of Global Political Economy and director of the Center on Global Economic Governance at Columbia University.
Deaton is the Senior Scholar and Dwight D. Eisenhower Professor of Economics, and International Affairs Emeritus at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs in the Economics Department at Princeton University. His research includes work on poverty, inequality, health, well-being, economic development, and randomized controlled trials.
He received the Nobel prize in 2015 for his research into how the consumption of goods and services plays a critical role in human welfare. In 2016, Deaton, a native of Scotland, was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for his service in the fields of economics and international affairs.
Perhaps the best summary of his work on economic health and development is his 2013 book, The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality. The book carefully documents the remarkable progress in income and health that has taken place, especially over the past 50 years. Despite large-scale increases in income around the world that have pulled millions of people out of poverty, Deaton details why gaping inequality remains, both between and within nations. That inequality, decades if not centuries in the making, can be understood not only by poring over economic data, but also pairing economic research with health data. For instance, Deaton looks at metrics such as the height of women from many countries over the course of decades as a key marker of economic progress.
The book also explores how global development aid may have exacerbated problems relating to poverty rather than reducing them. Deaton’s book combines respect for the progress made with an open questioning of gaps in the progress and efforts to address those gaps. He gives suggestions on how the global economy can engage those displaced and left behind by reforming incentives to companies and lifting trade restrictions in the developing world.
“Professor Deaton is an outstanding economist whose careful research and empirical methods have informed and challenged our thinking around global health and poverty in low- and middle-income countries. He doesn’t accept easy answers and carefully assesses what works and what doesn’t work,” said WDI President Paul Clyde. “Deaton’s thinking is very relevant to WDI’s mission and we’re honored he can join us for our 25th anniversary event. We’re looking forward to his speech and a lively discussion that will be illuminating for students, faculty, and anyone interested the development of low- and middle-income countries.”
WDI has instituted several changes to its Healthcare Initiative to better coordinate the initiative’s work, increase its capacity and ultimately grow its impact.
As part of the changes, Pascale R. Leroueil has been named director of the Healthcare Initiative. Leroueil joined WDI as a part-time research fellow in January 2015, and became a full-time research manager of the Healthcare Initiative’s Healthcare Delivery focus area about three months later. She assumed her new role as director in July.
Her work mainly explores improving healthcare delivery in emerging markets at the point where patients and healthcare service providers meet. Leroueil’s particular focus is on operational efficiency at the clinic and hospital level, although this work often touches on other aspects of the healthcare business model.
Before joining WDI, Leroueil worked in vaccine development at U-M’s Medical School, where she holds an adjunct appointment. She earned a master’s and a PhD in Physical Chemistry from U-M, and her MBA from U-M’s Ross School of Business.
As a WDI research manager, Leroueil spent six months in 2016 in Geneva collaborating with the Global Fund to support its work in healthcare delivery.
Leroueil will oversee three of the initiative’s focus areas – Healthcare Delivery, Market Dynamics and Supply Chain. A fourth focus area, Health Information Systems, has also been added to the initiative. David Butz has been appointed WDI Senior Research Fellow to bolster the Institute’s academic research on health information systems and apply it to the initiative’s work. Butz also serves as an adjunct lecturer of Business Administration at Ross. He has written extensively about the potential of health information technology to improve patient care, most recently in an article he authored for NextBillion, a WDI affiliated site.
Pascale R. Leroueil
Leroueil said she is thrilled to lead the talented, knowledgeable and experienced Healthcare Initiative team.
“We’re an academically minded group that’s focused on providing practical solutions to healthcare-related challenges,” she said. “While our work in supply chain, market dynamics and healthcare delivery has historically been our bread and butter, we’re excited to branch out into health information systems, too. I think there are a lot of opportunities on the horizon for us as an initiative, particularly as the private sector begins to play a larger role in healthcare, and donors and governments look to identify new health-related business models to decrease their costs.”
WDI President Paul Clyde said Leroueil’s diverse background will help to advance the Initiative.
“Pascale brings an unusual combination of scientific research skills and an understanding of business that fits very well with our mission,” Clyde said. “She also has good relationships with important global health organizations and experience with health care delivery organizations on the ground. She is well positioned to bring different areas of work in global health together and move it forward.”
LiveWell is a specialty rehabilitation center aiming to improve the accessibility of high quality neurological rehabilitation in Hyderabad, India and provide step-down care for patients who have experienced brain trauma such as stroke, brain injury, or brain surgery. A team was engaged to complete a market analysis, including analysis of the current state of the market, barriers to entry, and competition, and recommend a market entry strategy. The team developed a market entry strategy and provided recommendations around patient & physician awareness, pricing models and recruitment of medical staff.
Unicorpus Health Foundation is located in the city of Hyderabad, India. It was established by a core group of eight clinicians to provide healthcare to the elderly in the city. Their target market is population segments that cannot afford the more expensive for-profit hospitals but still have the ability to pay something instead of using the government system. The team worked on a business plan for a self-sustaining rehabilitation center in Hyderabad. The plan incorporated recommendations on types of services that should be offered as well as best practices and conceptual frameworks that Unicorpus can use as they continue to refine their strategy and business model.
Hospital Evangelico, in the city of Siguatepeque, Honduras, was established in 1949 by the Central American Mission from Dallas, USA. The hospital offers affordable services and programs to reach people in need. The mission of Hospital Evangelico is “to promote total health: physical, emotional, social and spiritual.” It offers a full range of clinical and diagnostic services, in addition to providing nursing education and community outreach programs. An intern was engaged to conduct an analysis of the hospital’s current financial situation and deliver recommendations and a roadmap to aid the hospital in meeting its goal. The student intern assessed and provided recommendations within the following areas: organizational structure, workforce (wages, benefits, turnover, skilled vs. unskilled, employee satisfaction), infrastructure/operations, internal processes, patient trend, revenue, costs, donations, financial reporting/metrics, and organizational culture.
Virika is a non-profit hospital located in Fort Portal, Uganda. It has a stated mission to serve the poor and vulnerable (mothers and children under five), and it enjoys a good reputation in Fort Portal and the surrounding area. The project provided an assessment of the processes within the inpatient department. The group’s process flow analysis helped Virika Hospital reach financial sustainability by: (1) Identifying opportunities for operational efficiency gains and cost cutting; (2) Identifying opportunities for service quality improvements; (3) Informing accurate costing and potential pricing changes of products and services; (4) Revealing and prioritizing opportunities for increased revenue generation
Our partnership with the Ruli District Hospital (RDH) and the Ihangane Project (TIP) is to improve healthcare service delivery and operations in Rwanda’s Gakenke District. The Ihangane Project is invested in the improvement of health in the Ruli area, through the provision of material, clinical, and technical assistance to the Ruli District Hospital Health System and Ruli community members. The project scope focused on patient tracking, in order of priority, patient tracking within the hospital, patient tracking between the health centers and the hospital, and patient tracking at the health centers, which did not currently track patients at all. The team provided recommendations on understanding staff capacities, patient-tracking process improvements and implementation.
The Ethio-American Doctors Group (EADG), a cohort of 250 physicians, is building a state-of-art hospital in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The hospital is expected to consist of 300 hospital beds, 8 operating rooms, and an 80-room multi-specialty clinic. A team developed a high-level business plan for EADG Cancer Center to be built in Addis Ababa. The report included a financial and operating model which identified initial start-up/investment costs, equipment and staffing needs, operating model and operating expense estimates, patient mix and revenue estimates. The team also provided summary of key findings, ancillary recommendations and touched upon potential governance issues and solutions.
KenyaRelief is a US & Kenyan non-profit organization in Migori, Kenya. They are a faith based ministry operating a surgery center, school and an orphanage in Kenya. KenyaRelief is undergoing continuous expansion and envisions becoming a 300-bed medical center. A team was engaged to conduct analysis and provide recommendations on KenyaRelief’s governance structure as it transitions from an outpatient, mission-oriented medical clinic to a 300-bed full-service medical center as well as a recommendation of what structural changes can be made to support the future facility and ensure a smooth transition of control from primarily US to primarily Kenyan leadership. The team provided recommendations on a short-medium-long-term governance structure (to accommodate its growth), establishment of board of trustees & board of directors including composition of members and selection criteria and an implementation plan to achieve the outcomes.