Health Care

Naya Jeevan is a Miller Center GSBI Alumni offering health insurance for the working poor.

Rationale

At least 400 million people do not have access to one or more essential health services.16 The overwhelming majority of these people are in the developing world, where leading causes of death still include preventable and treatable diseases such as heart diseases, tuberculosis, and diabetes.

An increasing number of innovations are emerging to tackle this problem, which are resulting in dramatically more cost-effective ways to conduct diagnosis, testing, and service delivery for health care. These include new health technologies, repurposing of existing technologies and infrastructure, new healthcare education approaches, improved healthcare products targeted to the needs and ability to pay of the world’s poor, and innovations in the delivery of care. New approaches to healthcare financing (e.g., micro-insurance products and various risk-sharing arrangements) complement these innovations.

Types of Investments

Investments might be made in the following areas:

• Advanced telemedicine, mobile technologies, electronic medical records, patient engagement platforms, and managed care platforms

• High-quality and affordable diagnostic tools and services

• Companies that practice socially sound management techniques that improve worker health and productivity

• Healthcare service delivery/distribution models (e.g., increased efficiency, door-to-door services), and communications (e.g., remote/telemedicine, integrated cell phone communications)

• Healthcare finance

• Healthcare insurance

• Healthcare education to service providers, health professionals, and patients

Sample Capital Allocation

Examples of direct investments include:

• Equity investment in Salauno, which offers specialized eye-care (cataract surgeries) in Mexico.

• Private equity investment in Naya Jeevan, which offers 70 million working poor in Pakistan a way to gain affordable basic health insurance from private carriers

Examples of indirect investments include:

• Private equity fund investment in Better Ventures, which invests in technology startups building innovative solutions to solve big problems, in sectors ranging from work and education to health and sustainability