HealthManagement, Volume 17 - Issue 5, 2017

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Introducing a global healthcare financing perspective

Meet HealthManagement.org’s latest board member for EXEC and find out what he plans to bring to readers.

 

What are your key areas of interest and research?

 

My professional interests lie in emerging markets healthcare financing. As the Global Lead for Healthcare at International Finance Corporation (IFC), I support a broader team responsible for a $2bln healthcare investment portfolio, across health services, pharma, and medtech. Our objective is to help achieve Universal Health Coverage by expanding access to quality, affordable healthcare. We achieve this through both advisory and investment support to private sector healthcare groups in emerging markets.

 

What are the major challenges in your field?

 

The challenges vary by region and country, but IFC’s biggest value addition is in the most challenging and poorest countries. In those settings, three of the biggest challenges for private sector healthcare development are:

 

  1. Lack of skilled workers. Of course, this pertains to nurses, doctors and other allied health workers, but also there is a dearth of healthcare management professionals with the skills needed to drive sustainable health businesses; 
  2. Lack of proven and scalable business models. Often in nascent health markets it’s difficult to find investable opportunities. We at IFC are well positioned to help “create” these opportunities by bringing different tools to foster growth and address constraints both at a company level and the country level (e.g. by working to improve regulatory environments);
  3. Lack of quality. Healthcare service providers in these markets often lack the prerequisite quality for us to feel comfortable investing in them. Here too we can bring a lot of value by helping companies with their clinical governance, patient safety and quality processes

 

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What is your top management tip?

 

I very much believe that often the greatest opportunities for improvement in an organisation come down to very simple, fundamental things such as fostering better communication, setting clear goals and objectives, and ensuring room for creativity.

 

If you had not chosen this career path what do you think you would have become?

 

I always had a secret interest in filmmaking. I think it would have been an interesting, and quite different, career pursuit.

 

What are your personal interests outside of work?

 

I very much enjoy down time with my family and am perfectly comfortable lying on the beach with a book or pretty much doing nothing. However, I am also a painter, and enjoy a myriad of sports.

 

Your  favourite quote?

It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change. Charles Darwin

 

As a new Editorial Board member, what do you hope to contribute to HealthManagement.org?

 

I am quite excited to join the editorial board of Health-Management.org. I hope to bring an emerging markets investor perspective to the content. Through my role, I see a lot of different and innovative healthcare business models, trends in private sector delivery and financing, new technology developments, and approaches to regulatory issues. I feel there is a lot to learn from what is going on in different parts of the world in healthcare, and I hope to bring some of this to light to HealthManagement.org’s readership.