RECAP: Fireside Chat: Solving Developing World Healthcare Challenges

STAND BY - Tonight's fireside chat will be broadcast live right here at 7pm Pacific time.

It’s time again for another live “fireside chat” with two interesting sustainability thought leaders. On October 30, Nick Aster will be chatting with World Health Partners' Vice President, Karen Pak Oppenheimer, MS MPH, as well as Medic Mobile's COO Mainul Islam and Arthur Combs of Schaffer Combs in order to understand some of the solutions currently available to address global healthcare problems. As always, this chat will be about an hour long and begin with a brief interview. He’ll then open it up to audience members who want to talk about rural public health.

If you are in the Bay Area, please register here to attend in person at the HUB.  If not, just bookmark this page and we’ll have a live streaming video of the whole event ready for you to be virtually present.

In the meantime, if you’d like to get the conversation rolling early, please leave comments or questions and he’ll make an effort to incorporate them into his interview and the ensuing discussion.

IF YOU CAN’T MAKE IT, DON’T WORRY!  We’ll be broadcasting the chat live on our Google Plus channel.  Just bookmark this post and we’ll have a YouTube-style interface you can click on when the chat begins, or to watch later.

Biographies of our Guests

Arthur Combs, Ph.D.

Arthur began his career as a commodities broker and earned a doctorate from the London School of Economics. He has worked in international development since 1984, with a focus on East Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, in both peacetime and low-intensity conflict environments. Following his years a broker, Arthur served as founding CEO of Source Healthcare Systems from 1998-2003. Prior to co-founding Schaffer&Combs in 2009 he led a number of non profit organizations as Executive Director, consultant, and founding board president.

Today, Arthur provides outsourced organizational management, program management, grants management, and impact assessment for a range of clients. Much of his work focuses on health care in East Africa, where he has managed grants, performed due diligence, and provided technical assistance for programs including HIV prevention, clinical medicine, hospital construction, community health workers, rural health insurance, services for people with disabilities, and continuing medical education.

Karen Pak Oppenheimer MS, MPH, Vice President, World Health Partners

Karen’s work at WHP focuses on strategic development, program management and partnerships. She plays a key role in exploring and adopting new technologies to WHP’s rural health platform, developing program performance measurements and metrics, and is leading the effort in replicating WHP’s model in the African setting. Karen’s experience ranges from proteomics research, healthcare information technology, to HIV/AIDS prevention. She has worked in both the public and private sectors including the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, OracleCorporation, and the United Nations Population Fund China. Karen holds a bachelor of science in chemical engineering from Johns Hopkins University, a master of science in biotechnology from Northwestern University, and a master of public health from the University of California, Berkeley.

Mainul Islam, COO, Medic Mobile

Medic Mobile began when a few students at Stanford and Lewis & Clark started using a free software application called FrontlineSMS to coordinate community health workers at St Gabriel’s Hospital. We weren’t software developers or medical doctors—just passionate, thoughtful people who enjoyed tinkering and realized that we could use technology to improve health care in very challenging settings. Building on early successes in Malawi, we’ve since helped more than thirty organizations use technology to improve health services in more than fifteen countries.

Our broader toolkit now includes software we’ve developed as well as open source software created by other organizations. We’ve stayed true to the idea that the greatest health impact per dollar invested comes from making use of tools that are already available, rather than developing something new for each project. As a tech company that’s constantly fired up about health impact, we’re proud to have supported some outstanding health care providers. One hundred percent of our impact comes from helping our partners access mobile technology that can improve the services they provide.