Scaling-Up Inclusive Healthcare Initiatives in Low and Middle Income Countries - Assessing the landscape of innovative approaches
Non-communicable diseases (NCDs) are on the rise in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), increasing the financial and health burden affecting these vulnerable populations. To reverse this trend will require not only resources, but also new business models for LMICs that can overcome the barriers patients face to receiving care, such as unaffordable, unavailable, or inaccessible healthcare services and treatments, and limited awareness of disease and preventative care.
Over the past decade, a new wave of pioneer healthcare initiatives has emerged that aims to improve the quality of care and access to healthcare of vulnerable populations in LMICs by building commercially viable and scalable enterprises. These pioneers are developing novel delivery models – inclusive clinics and hospitals, pharmacy-based, community-based, and risk-prevention models – and are innovating to solve patient pain points by making use of mobile and digital technologies, offering financing and insurance solutions, and improving access to preventative and primary care.
This report reviews the preliminary findings of a study performed by the IQVIA Institute for Human Data Science, together with Hystra, to learn from pioneer organizations what underlies their early successes and what is limiting them from reaching further scale or impact. It reviews the landscape of global inclusive initiatives and identifies innovations that can strengthen the impact of businesses. This work is intended to feed a later phase of research whose ultimate intent is to identify and scale up effective inclusive businesses.
In that second phase of the analysis, which will be presented in a future report in this series, an in-depth analysis will be conducted of selected initiatives deemed to be promising, to understand the reason for their success, their scalability challenges, and concrete solutions to solve these issues. The intent will be to build on these lessons to share with partners high-potential localized blueprints offering concrete opportunities to target non-communicable diseases.
