Recently, Ashoka India selected WHP’s Founder and President, Gopi Gopalakrishnan to be one of its new class of twelve 2015 fellows. The fellowship is aimed at fostering the work of leading social entrepreneurs who present innovative solutions to social problems in India.
Read MoreLast May, Brent Myers, MD, joined Evolution Health, a Dallas-based, national integrated medical practice, as the chief medical officer and executive vice president for medical operations, and AMR, the nation’s largest ambulance service, as an associate chief medical officer. Before making this move, Myers had been widely recognized for his work to build a mobile integrated healthcare program there to offer in-home care, care referrals and a better system for treating people with mental illness.
Read MoreFor many people who don’t work in the EMS industry, the inner working of the ambulance system is a black box. We hope we never need an ambulance, but we understand if we have a medical emergency we can call 911 and an ambulance will show up at our door. Those types of calls–emergency calls–lead to some 44 million emergency medical transports every year in the US. Nearly just as many—42 million medical transports—are non-emergency medical transports, which often means moving people from one healthcare facility to another.
Read MoreLast week, Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s COO, published an emotional commentary on her experiences of grief after losing her husband, Dave Goldberg, in early May. Many have applauded Ms. Sandberg’s willingness to share her experiences publicly, to be vulnerable and open, and write about the difficulties of returning to life after loss and trying right a world that will never really be the same.
Read MoreLast week, World Health Partners (WHP) began training ten local entrepreneurs—six of them women—to use a special, mobile phone-enabled device developed by WHP to connect rural communities and doctors far away through a telemedicine-linked Sky network in Western Kenya. The entrepreneurs are being trained to use basic SIM card-powered cellphones to offer community members a way to share vital medical information with network doctors.
Read MoreRecently, a number of headlines have claimed that the mobile-enabled car service company, Uber, now offers faster service than an ambulance. Granted, the business models for Uber and EMS are not the same and the services provided by a paramedic and an Uber driver are not comparable. The articles call attention to longstanding and ill-conceived quality and value measure in EMS: response times and beg a larger question of the EMS industry.
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