The business of better health: Wyman Worldwide Health Partners.

The health concerns of sub-Saharan African countries like Rwanda are often summarized in five letters: TB, HIV. Yet some international health experts and organizations are working hard to remind us that in countries such as these, HIV and TB may only account for 10% of health concerns. That means that diseases that aren't such big headliners account for the other 90% of disease burden. Pneumonia, for example, kills far more people than AIDS and malaria combined, yet only 20% of children in Rwanda with pneumonia receive the antibiotic treatment that could cure it.

These facts and figures come from Wyman Worldwide Health Partners. Created by Ro and Bill Wyman, this non-profit organization aims to bolster the health care delivery systems of rural African communities by working at the grassroots level. Currently working in Rwanda, their approach is called CCHIPS: Comprehensive Community Health Initiatives and Programs, a model focusing on strengthening five specific areas:

1. Community Engagement,

2. Infrastructure,

3. Management System,

4. Medical Processes, and

5. Promotional Programs.

In a recent write-up in a Harvard Business Review forum the Wymans warn of the weakness of the international health tendency to focus on specific diseases, rather than strengthening health systems as a whole. Instead, they call for a more comprehensive approach that implements their five-pronged approach to:

• "Constructing a proper health infrastructure. More rural facilities are needed throughout Africa, and existing facilities need to be upgraded with cost-effective and practical technologies to provide electricity, adequate sanitation, and clean water, and stocked with drugs and medical equipment.


• Ensuring that all essential healthcare services are available at the community level, including medical treatments; preventive care, such as vaccinations and family planning; and education on personal health matters, such as hygiene and nutrition.


• Providing training. Community healthcare workers, who commonly have no medical training, need to be educated in diagnostic protocols and medical processes.


• Improving management. Managers need basic training in finance, human resources, pharmaceutical administration, data collection, and other fields. This will enable health centers to be more effective in the short term and self-sustaining in the long term."

Combined with developing public health, economic and social infrastructure, the approach would help to not only improve a nation's health measures, but also general standard of living and resilience against unexpected hardships.

The current cholera outbreak in Haiti could be an example of what happens when we do not head the Wyman's warnings. Haiti's latest health crisis was completely foreseeable and preventable were it not for a weak and generally inept local government combined with siloed, narrowly focused international aid efforts that lack a coordinated, long term, systematic approach.

The Wyman's approach makes far more sense as a means of strengthening health systems, and creating an underlying environment that could fully benefit from the deployment of functional technologies such as mhealth innovations offered by InSTEDD, Sproxil, and Datadyne.