By Carolyn Gray Anderson
The 2015 Alumni Weekend Conference explored timely, topical themes from the Internet of Things to new business opportunities in fresh food culture. One of the panels, titled “Managing a Global Health Crisis” and moderated by UCLA Anderson Adjunct Professor Emeritus Victor Tabbush, engaged four diverse professionals on subjects such as how best to allocate restricted resources for what amounts to unlimited need.
Tabbush opened with commentary on the Ebola outbreak in African countries that became overwhelmed by the emergency and struggled to meet their populations’ tremendous needs. The “indigenous response,” as Tabbush put it, was inadequate to the task of curtailing full-blown crisis. He said it revealed stark disparities across the globe among health systems and how they bear up to such strains. Hugh Chang (’90), director of strategy, planning and management at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, noted the “inequitable distribution of both the burden and its solutions.” And Dr. Rekha Murthy of the hospital epidemiology department at Cedars-Sinai commented that major crises like Ebola are not any one country’s problem. “In the world of communicable diseases, the usual competitiveness turns to cooperation,” she said.
But Murthy stressed that “you never want to be responding to a crisis, you want to be prepared all the time.” She said her department’s agenda hinges on supporting and empowering frontline health care workers. When the conversation turned to new technologies, she said that “the ability to get rapid information about problems in the clinical world faced elsewhere is a great way to mobilize. We’ve seen it result in amazing innovations.” However, she said, while mobile apps and social media are effective in breaking and disseminating news, early messages are not always complete or correct; the potential for misinformation can lead to additional confusion, and neither government nor frontline teams can keep pace. Robust communication and oversight among individuals make all the difference, she said, when trying to relay accurate vital information.
With a background in the tech sector, Tim Elliott (’04) said, “This is the part that gets me most excited about global health.” Elliott is founder and managing director of Amplify Markets, a strategic advisory service that supports social enterprises and nonprofit clients wishing to utilize market-based approaches to meet social challenges. He’s encouraged by the ways that technology can enhance information and communication in remote places. Microfinancing for vital health products and services, he said, is directly enabled by mobile collection systems.
With the developing world shouldering the bulk of the planet’s disease burden, the Gates Foundation focuses on where inequity resides and how to address it. The M.A.C. AIDS Fund has, since 1994, exclusively targeted AIDS and HIV, with relevant grants to organizations around the world providing vital services to people living with and affected by HIV/AIDS. Erin Eriksson (’08), executive director of the fund’s Americas Programs, said that, to date, the fund has raised $365 million from sales of Viva Glam lipsticks alone; it is the largest corporate non-pharmaceutical funder of causes related to curbing HIV/AIDS for men, women and children.
In the landscape of market failures preventing the developing world from contending better with health crises, the Viva Glam model of funneling 100 percent of the selling price to the fund is one solution. Chang, an executive in the world’s largest private foundation, stressed that the sustainability of effective programs lies in keeping the private sector involved. Elliott’s company, inspired by his earlier work in the field with PATH (Program for Appropriate Technology in Health), deals exclusively with private-sector partners in the developing world, with an emphasis on prevention. He said the challenge of taking in “overseas expertise” on health care resources is that it can become a one-way conversation. He thinks of his constituents as customers: “What do they need and want in order to make changes in their lives?” Getting buy-in from the people affected, versus selling to them from outside, requires humility, he said.
Want to keep up with other Anderson alumni? Download the UCLA Anderson Events app from the Google Play Store or iTunes.
Comments