Group loan recipients in Mexico City meet once a month with loan officers and receive health screenings at Pro Mujer, one of the organizations featured in the Health Affairs article on diabetes innovation
Published October 13, 2015 under Research News
Diabetes challenges the entirety of health systems around the world. Over the course of his or her life, a person with diabetes is likely to need the services not only of primary care providers but also community health workers, dentists, pharmacists, endocrinologists, podiatrists, ophthalmologists and nephrologists.
Nascent health systems struggling to provide medical care are often ill-equipped to offer the timely diagnosis and treatment that people with diabetes require to avoid disability and early death, and more advanced systems too often fail to coordinate diabetes care, leaving patients with expensive, disjointed and fragmented information and services.
DGHI partner Innovations in Healthcare and the Brookings Institution recently teamed up to publish a paper in Health Affairs to highlight how health care entrepreneurs in the Innovations in Healthcare network are working to prevent and treat diabetes and how policy makers can encourage and facilitate innovation. The authors, including Krishna Udayakumar, associate professor of global health and medicine and executive director of Innovations in Healthcare, examine approaches by ClickMedix and Pro Mujer, two of the innovators in the network.
Pro Mujer is working to prevent and screen for diabetes throughout Latin America by integrating clinical tests and health information with financial services marketed to low-income women. ClickMedix operates e-health technology platforms throughout the world to improve patient self- and team-management of diabetes care. Both organizations offer bundled diabetes services directly to patients at a lower cost than available alternatives.
The paper looks at the path to scale for each organization and the regulatory and payment challenges they faced working with the public sector in different countries. The authors offer a framework to highlight policy barriers—institutional, regulatory and financial—to the implementation of transformative innovations in diabetes care. This framework builds on accountable care principles that support better patient-level outcomes at lower cost and could have implications for helping policy makers better address the challenges of diabetes and other chronic diseases.
Diffusing innovation in diabetes care is not easy, but it is a crucial task right now for policy makers around the world. Although many promising innovations exist, they are too often not reaching the people who need them the most. The authors hope this paper will spur more thinking and discussion about public-private partnerships among policy makers and help innovators think about paths to scale as they spread their innovations from country to country.
Adapted from an article by Jennifer Cook, communications manager at Innovations in Healthcare, and reprinted with permission.
Diffusing innovation in diabetes care is not easy, but it is a crucial task right now for policy makers around the world. Although many promising innovations exist, they are too often not reaching the people who need them the most.
