Michael Chu, David Bloom

By many measures, the world today is a healthier place than ever before, yet a daunting set of deficits and disparities remains to be tackled. For various reasons, it is not clear that the traditional tandem of government and civil society are up to those challenges. This creates an opportunity for private enterprise to fill the breach. Indeed, evidence on the actual and potential contribution of private enterprise to public health is growing.

David Bloom, Elizabeth Cafiero, Michael Chu

Health decision makers throughout the world face a multiplicity of challenges. As resource limitations are a fundamental fact of life, choices necessarily have to be made about which challenges to address, and the best way to tackle them. In this piece, we discuss the distinction between the strategic and tactical components of priority setting in health.

This piece is part of a larger collaboration – Antares – between the Harvard School of Public Health and the Harvard Business School. Antares is focused on harnessing the power of private enterprise for public health. Priority-setting is a central theme of the research arm of Antares. For more information, visit www.hsph.harvard.edu.

Garry Emmons

How do you make health care for the poor affordable and self-sustaining? Make public health delivery commercially viable.