Our current approach to healthcare isn't working. Medical science has made progress by leaps and bounds with the advent of antibiotics, modern surgery, and the increasing application of technology to every area of healthcare, that has improved human life expectancy and recovery from disease. However, the way we provide healthcare to people across the world needs massive improvement. Not only is it preventing us from realizing the full benefits of the medical advancements we have made, but it is also holding back our true potential for progressing medical science to benefit humanity.

Today, there is high health risk across vast regions of the world. There are issues with the quality of care including inaccurate diagnosis, medical errors, and problems with medical practices in all countries at all economic levels. Healthcare infrastructure is lacking across most regions in the world and there is a severe lack of physicians and medical staff virtually everywhere. Underprivileged and developing nations severely lack health infrastructure and services, while the cost of healthcare is getting prohibitively high in advanced nations, increasing at a rate where it will become over 50% of the gross domestic product (GDP) before the end of the century, a level of expenditure that can bankrupt most countries! There is a global deficiency of physicians and medical staff. While poor nations are the worst hit, developed nations are facing a severe problem as well, with the USA projecting a shortage of more than 100,000 doctors by 2030. Even this doesn’t give a fully accurate picture, as the lack of trained, experienced physicians makes the situation even worse. Perhaps the most alarming and disturbing problem caused by today’s approach and systems is the rampant corruption in healthcare at a global scale. Physicians all over the world get kickbacks for prescribing medication. Doctors in India routinely perform procedures such as putting unnecessary stents in patients’ arteries or performing unrequired hysterectomies on the poorest women after childbirth to collect government insurance. Patients have to pay bribes in places like France, Germany and China for getting proper healthcare. Even in today’s information age, health information is not managed or handled properly. With the corporate inspired, enterprise driven approach most of the world is taking, economically challenged and developing nations cannot afford the expenditure for implementing electronic health records and advanced nations like the USA have severely flawed implementation resulting in health systems that fail to communicate with each other, do not empower patients or provide them more transparency, and cause resentment and burnout amongst physicians and medical staff. Indeed, fully 50% of physicians in the USA say that they do not want their children to take up medicine, a disturbing trend that is bound to catch up with us in the worst way possible.

“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” -Albert Einstein

Looking at all these problems, it is apparent that the state of healthcare is a “global epidemic”! We must do something about it. We must take a fresh approach. We must bring about a global transformation. Transform Global Health is an initiative to help achieve this. It is an action oriented program that will not just highlight global healthcare issues and bring our voices together, but also fund and implement actual, large scale, impactful projects that will achieve concrete results in transforming healthcare.

The first two projects we have undertaken are to implement the universal health information network (UNHIN), and to create a model hospital system that implements efficient technology, ethical practices and the controls required to provide the highest quality of care