Transforming Healthcare for the 21st Century: Innovations from the Ground Up

Session leaders

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  Andrea Coleman Speaker

  Founder, Riders for Health International

  I am a wife, a mother and a grandmother. I had little schooling as I didn't see the value in it. I preferred to be earning money doing jobs like window cleaning, newspaper delivery and even working in a circus. I love motorcycles and motorcycle racing. Injustice makes me angry, I co-founded Riders for Health with my husband, Barry Coleman. I learned to do fundraising and promotion and building an organisation while Barry worked in Africa to prove our vision that managed transportation - motorcycles and ambulances - and contributing to health systems from a very pragmatic and practical level - is the key to allowing rural communities in Africa access to health care. Disaster struck Riders for Health at the end of 2015 and the Riders UK sank. I founded Two Wheels for Life to continue providing support for Riders for Health International - which reaches 24 million people and runs 2500 vehicles in seven African countries. The support we provide is financancial, mentoring, facilitation and capacity building. True development cannot happen if the culture, the systems and processes are not owned and run by Africans and we give all the support we can to enable Riders for Health International to develop deep roots in the continent for which our innovation was designed and which remains so neglected despite the fact that predictable mobility for goods and services for health care is critical.

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• 
  Gary Cohen Speaker

  Co-Founder and President, Health Care Without Harm

  Gary Cohen has been a pioneer in the environmental health movement for thirty years. He has helped build coalitions and networks globally to address the environmental health impacts related to toxic chemical exposure and climate change. Cohen is Co-Founder and President of Health Care Without Harm (www.noharm.org), and Practice Greenhealth (www.practicegreenhealth.org). In 2006, Cohen received the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship. In 2007, he received the Frank Hatch Award for enlightened public service. In 2011, The New England Office of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) awarded Cohen an Environmental Merit Award in recognition of exceptional work and commitment to the environment. Cohen was named by the Huffington Post as a Game Changer in Healthy Living, as well as being named an Ashoka Fellow. In 2013, he was awarded the Champion of Change Award for Climate Change and Public Health by the White House. In 2015, Cohen was named a MacArthur Fellow and was a recipient of a “genius” grant from the MacArthur Foundation.

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  Rebecca Onie Speaker

  Co-Founder and CEO, Health Leads

  In 1996, Rebecca Onie co-founded Health Leads to address the fundamental drivers of patients’ health. With our hospital, community health center, and integrated delivery system partners, Health Leads has enabled physicians and other healthcare providers across the country to “prescribe” food, electricity, and other basic resources their patients need to be healthy – and armed a variety of workforces to “fill” those social needs prescriptions by working side-by-side with patients to access the existing landscape of community resources. Health Leads arms healthcare institutions with the tools, technology, analytics, best practices, and peer community necessary to address their own patients’ resource needs and to champion a healthcare system that address all patients’ basic resource needs as a standard part of quality care. Last year, Health Leads directly served over 14,000 patients and their families, touching nearly 50,000 total lives. In 2009, Rebecca was honored to receive a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship. She has also been recognized by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s 2012 Young Leader Award; Network for Excellence in Health Innovation’s 2014 “Innovators in Health” Award; Forbes Magazine’s Impact 30, recognizing the world’s top 30 social entrepreneurs; and the Schwab Foundation’s 2013 Social Entrepreneur of the Year. Rebecca is one of the Aspen Institute’s inaugural Health Innovator Fellows; a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader; member of the Mayo Clinic Center for Innovation External Advisory Council; and a One Acre Fund board member.

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• 
  Vera Cordeiro Speaker

  Founder and Board President, Saúde Criança

  Founder and Chairwoman of the Board of Associação Saúde Criança was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. She received her MD as a general practioner in 1975 from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. From 1978 to 1998, she worked at the Hospital da Lagoa founding in 1979 the Psychosomatic Department. In 1991, she founded the Associação Saúde Criança, a social organization that uses a pioneering methodology to promote the well-being of socially vulnerable families, with long-term results, proven by researchers at Georgetown University (link: http://www.saudecrianca.org.br/wp-content/uploads/Saude-Crianca-Brief-English-Final-1.pdf) . It has also an impact on public policy in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, helping thousands of people through city government. ASC was elected by Global Geneva the best social organization of Latin American and the 19ª best of the world. Dr. Vera is an Ashoka fellow, a Skoll Foundation awardee, Schwab Foundation social entrepreneur, an Avina leader, a member of the World Council of Ashoka, a board member of Volans and from 2005-2011 a Board member of PATH: A Catalyst for Global Health.

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