Amplifying the Right to Healthcare

With more than 30 years of experience in the global health community that includes significant achievements in HIV prevention, domestic and global care, research, policy, and advocacy, I joined mothers2mothers (m2m) in 2012 as the President & Chief Executive Officer. Today, I lead a team of more than 2,000 m2m employees on three continents whose mission is to ensure healthy, thriving families and an end to pediatric AIDS.

Prior to joining m2m, I served as the Senior Vice President and Director of the Global Health, Population, and Nutrition Group at FHI 360, and before that as the Senior Vice President and Director of the Academy for Educational Development, where I re-established the organization as a leader in global AIDS programs. Earlier in my career, I created and directed the National Council of La Raza’s Center for Health Promotion in the United States.

Since 2001, mothers2mothers (m2m) has employed 11,000-plus women living with HIV as peer mentors who have supported over 11 million women, children, and adolescents from their communities with vital HIV/AIDS medical services, education, and assistance. These Mentor Mothers are empowered to deliver healthcare expertise in nine African nations.

As the HIV epidemic has evolved, so have we. We knew we needed to expand our service range, and to make better use of technology to ensure the dream of universal health coverage can become a reality. This will bring both health and economic benefit to marginalized populations.

We evolved our business model so that Peer Mentors can amplify their impact. We’ve embarked upon a multi-year eServices initiative to leverage the power of technology to intensify our client outreach. Reach more people. Measure results more precisely. And elevate humanity by ensuring healthy, thriving families and an end to pediatric AIDS.

The key problem m2m addresses is lack of access to essential healthcare services, including screening and testing for HIV and other illnesses, medical facility referrals, medication adherence counselling, and education. Contributing to the challenge, we work in countries with under-resourced public health systems, and where HIV myths and stereotypes oftentimes spur gender-based violence, stigma, and discrimination.

Without access to qualified health workers, tens of millions of Africans do not: 1) know their HIV status, 2) receive lifesaving treatment and medication, and 3) achieve viral suppression. m2m has solutions, but we need more client access throughout widespread urban and rural geographies.

Globally, 38 million people were living with HIV in 2018, including 1.7 million children under age 15. Fifty-four percent of this global total are the 20.6 million people living with HIV in Eastern and Southern Africa, which are m2m’s primary operational regions. In 2018, 800,000 people in these regions were newly infected with HIV and 310,000 died of AIDS-related causes. Through an eServices delivery model, m2m can augment face-to-face peer services to expand and intensify our reach and follow up with even more clients, thus establishing critical connections which make family healthcare a reality for millions of Africans.

The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated our need to immediately develop an eServices platform that allows m2m to connect with hundreds of thousands of clients when face-to-face peer mentoring is rendered impossible due to movement restrictions, or if demand for health services outstrips supply.

To start, we created a telephone-based system that expands our current Peer Mentor Model by using scripted one-to-one phone calls tailored by client risk status, and further supported by m2m’s existing client service and data-gathering apps.

To fight COVID-19 and strengthen existing peer-to-peer services, m2m next accelerated development of the Virtual Mentor Mother Platform (VMMP)—a WhatsApp-based interactive service in which new and existing clients receive health information and service referrals on demand through a WhatsApp chatbot. The program is being rolled out in more than 30 local languages throughout our current nine operational countries.

Phase One of the VMMP is COVID-19-focused, while Phase Two will include information and interactive services about HIV, reproductive health, non-communicable diseases, early childhood development, and adolescent health issues. The VMMP delivers a timely collection of lifesaving health information targeted specifically to our clients’ needs, while simultaneously allowing for convenient access to information 24/7 through an easily-shared technology.

m2m’s Peer Mentor Model is based on shared realities and common experiences. Mentor Mothers serve women, children, and adolescents from their own communities; they are not strangers from a different culture unfamiliar with local conditions.

We create impact for three core client groups—women, children, and adolescents—and adapt and design programming to meet their health needs.

For our enrolled female clients ages 15 to 49, our strategy delivers multiple impacts, namely reduced maternal mortality, and supporting women who are living with HIV to know their know their status, start and stay adherent to antiretroviral treatment, and achieve viral suppression.

m2m’s adolescent client impacts include stopping new HIV infections, reducing teenage pregnancy rates, and enhancing educational completion rates.

And for our enrolled child clients ages 0-9, our Mentor Mothers work to first reduce infant and child mortality rates, eliminate mother-to-child transmission of HIV, and then support these children so that they are on track with their health, learning, and psycho-social development milestones. The eServices platform’s tools and approaches allow Mentor Mothers to expand upon and deepen these, and many other, impacts and keep attuned to client needs in a more real-time manner than ever before.

Let’s do a basic math projection:

What if m2m could conservatively enroll just five percent more new clients annually through our eServices platform?

Based on our 2018 results, that would translate into 44,750 more Africans receiving access to lifesaving healthcare education. And that’s in addition to the annual client growth we achieve through our existing face-to-face service delivery model.

44,750 people likely neglected by current healthcare service modalities. 44,750 humans benefiting from simple, accessible technology. 44,750 Africans supported by potentially lifesaving treatment. 44,750 more people tapping into their basic human right to quality health coverage.

44,750 stories of hope.

During a January 2020 gathering of m2m’s management team, we brainstormed how we could apply technologies to reach more clients. We coined the phrase “Virtual Mentor Mother” as a catch-all term for how technology and artificial intelligence could one day potentially come to a confluence to support greater access to universal health coverage.

Little did we know that two months later our initial dreams would awaken to the global COVID-19 nightmare.

m2m’s eServices platform bolted from a dreamlike state to reality within a matter of weeks. As we witnessed how the pandemic was affecting and spreading from countries like China, Italy, and Spain, we sprang into action by revisiting those January conversations and creating the Virtual Mentor Mother Platform conceptual outline.

We started by examining how we could best keep our frontline healthcare workers safe while still delivering programming and services. Compounding this baseline challenge is that our frontline Mentor Mothers are living with HIV, so they’re especially vulnerable to the coronavirus.

In typical m2m fashion, we applied collaborative approaches throughout every phase of the platform’s development. Corporate titles, department ownership, knowledge silos…they were all left at the virtual door as we attacked the challenges and built the solution.

m2m was founded to prevent the transmission of HIV from mothers to their children. Our progress has been stunning, and for five consecutive years, we’ve achieved virtual elimination of HIV transmission from mothers to children among enrolled clients. Along the way, we’ve transformed and empowered women through our business model and programming.

With success on one front, new challenges abound on others. For example, while we may save children from HIV at birth, they’re contracting it as young adults. And HIV co-morbidities—such as tuberculosis and diabetes—are even greater risks during the COVID-19 pandemic.

m2m’s eServices—especially the Virtual Mentor Mother Platform—combine our people-centric model with everyday technologies to create a real chance at achieving healthier lives.

And all it takes is access to a mobile phone. This project creates a new line of professional engagement for African women. We don’t need to motivate Mentor Mothers to deliver m2m’s solutions…their passion is borne from their direct experience of living with HIV. Instead, we want to engage and train more to use these new tools so that universal health access is no longer a “wouldn’t it be nice” goal, but rather a daily expected outcome.

We could offer more than 11 million reasons why m2m is well positioned to deliver this project. That’s the number of women and children under age two that we’ve reached with our lifesaving programs and services in sub-Saharan Africa since our founding. And that was all before we devised the eServices transformation.

Just imagine how many more lives we can transform by fully integrating the eServices platform into our business model.

With our proven experience at Ground Zero in the battle against HIV and AIDS, m2m is extraordinarily well positioned to deliver on the promise and potential of our eServices platform. We currently have peer mentor teams located in nine African countries who know every inch of the lay of their local land, and are poised to deliver lifesaving health services in dramatically different and innovative ways throughout their communities.

Backing these frontline health workers is a cadre of public health, human development, childhood education, technology, evaluation and monitoring, operations, research, and communications experts who designed and built m2m’s community and health facility integrated service platform. Together, we’re applying our energy, passion, and skills to envision a new, unique, and incredibly special platform using basic mobile telephone and smartphone technologies so that no one—and we mean absolutely no one—is left behind when it comes to the undeniable human right to access qualified health care.

m2m’s DNA is intertwined with social entrepreneurship and an unwavering belief in health equity. We see needs, we create solutions. And yes, sometimes fail at first. As CEO, I embrace failing fast: We LEARN (Listen, Engage, Assess, Re-think, and Never quit until we get it right).

We originally planned to introduce eServices in 2022. But COVID-19 shifted us into warp speed mode.

This past March, we knew we had to implement eServices to reach clients during lockdowns. We weren’t fully digitized across countries, couldn’t deploy our current technology, and had to launch at scale in nine countries in multiple languages.

We had never previously built a chatbot nor considered repurposing volumes of information for eServices delivery, and couldn’t afford an army of developers to create the platform.

We embraced radically different thinking, then contacted friends for support, and they responded enthusiastically:

• An m2m Trustee volunteered a team of health communication specialists to map the platform’s architecture and write chatbot copy.
• An m2m founder served as a development advisor.
• A technology firm translated content and chatbot interactivity into 30-plus languages.

Nine weeks later, working non-stop across three continents, ten time zones, and a global pandemic, we launched the VMMP!

I oftentimes say: If you engage your passion, your heart grounds your brain and you’ll succeed.

I joined m2m in 2012 as CEO following a tumultuous year for the organization: Lower revenues, unremarkable program results, infrastructure problems, and a lethargic model. Donors wanted assurances I’d change course. Coupled with staff dubious of an American, albeit Mexican-American, at the helm meant I was assailed from all sides. 

Did I run? Yes, but not away. Instead, straight toward the problems.

I conducted intense listening sessions with staff, boards, and donors. I examined finances and programs, seeing nuggets of excellence and pathways for more.

I coached teams to embrace change, and facilitated a change buy-in process among senior- and mid-level management, and our boards. Together, we devised solutions before restructuring every department.

Today’s healthy m2m features skilled leaders in each department and country. Revenue has more than doubled. We’ve achieved virtual elimination of mother-to-child HIV transmission for five (soon to be six) consecutive years. We’ve launched new services, scaled to four additional countries, and serve more clients than ever.

When the time comes for a leadership transition, the new CEO will inherit an organization delivering quality results based on passion and impeccable evidence.

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m2m’s peer-based model and scale are truly one of a kind. With the launch of our eServices delivery range, we combined the power of smartphone technology with our proven human solutions to reach more vulnerable and marginalized communities, engage more people in care, provide them with health education, support their HIV treatment adherence, and link them to clinical services.

Our new eServices elevate a Mentor Mother’s performance opportunities, even when she is unable to leave her home due to a pandemic lockdown. Using scripted, structured voice calls to stay connected with clients, she can provide adherence counselling, appointment reminders, and offer education on a full spectrum of family health support topics.

We tailor our eServices to client risk profiles. For example, Mentor Mothers interact weekly with high-risk clients, while low-risk clients are on a monthly schedule. Since launching eServices in April 2020, we have enrolled nearly 80,000 new and existing clients in the platform.

The developing VMMP is a WhatsApp-based interactive platform where clients can receive vital COVID-19, general health, and wellness information. When fully rolled out to m2m’s nine operational countries in more than 30 local languages, we aim to provide direct VMMP services to our 1.1 million clients. Long term, we envision this innovative tool as just the first component of m2m’s technology-enabled service delivery platform which will help ensure universal health coverage for millions of currently marginalized people.

There is much being said and written about the “new normal” resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic. Layer on the reforms spurred by movements aiming to once and for all right the wrongs of entrenched racial and economic inequalities, and we are at a moment of profound global change in 2020. Change that we believe will create stronger, healthier, and more just societal structures worldwide.

This “new normal” is familiar territory for m2m.

You see, we don’t just talk about theory of change, or symbolically update social media postings regarding the need for eliminating inequalities.

We have fought health, gender, and racial inequities for 20 years, starting when HIV was cruelly decimating South Africa’s population. Staring down doubt and disbelief, m2m recognized then that if we didn’t change how expectant mothers living with HIV were treated, then generations of Africans would be lost to the epidemic.

Our theory of change is that solutions are best built and delivered by the community, for the community. And that accessing and staying in health services despite challenging conditions requires the advice and support of a peer who understands what one is experiencing.

This theory guides how we monitor, evaluate, and measure our social impact outcome indicators. For example, by deploying a flexible approach to assessing social impact, we can today analyze outcomes beyond m2m’s initial organizational focus on the prevention of HIV transmission from mother to child, to now include psycho-social wellbeing, gender equality, and economic empowerment of our Mentor Mothers throughout out programming.

More specifically, m2m adopted the Social Ecological Model of Health Promotion as an overarching framework for understanding the relationship between individuals and their environment. Through it, we assess the reciprocal interactions occurring on multiple levels among an individual, people close to them, their community, and broader societal structures/public policies. For effective and sustainable change, intervention needs to happen across these levels of influence.

From public health and psycho-social levels, m2m’s theory of change is influenced by several models and theories:

• Health Belief Model
• Information, Motivation, Behavior Skills, and Resource Model
• Social Learning Theory
• Theory of Interpersonal Behavior Prototype/Willingness Model

To answer this question, we should first broadly examine some numbers related to m2m as an organization, then we can address the figures specifically related to the eServices project.

Since 2001, m2m has reached more than 11 million women and children under age two with our services, and created more than 11,000 frontline health worker jobs for women living with HIV, thus likely making us the world’s largest intentional employer of women living with HIV.

On average, more than one million women, children, and adolescents throughout nine African nations depend on our vital, lifesaving work to create health, hope, and an HIV-free future each year.

Next, the following projections are for m2m’s new (not existing) client enrolments.

For our current reporting year, we anticipate enrolling a total of 932,000 new clients (up from 895,000), 45,000 of whom we’ll enroll through our new Virtual Mentor Mother Platform. For the following reporting year, we project VMMP direct client enrolment to expand to nearly 97,000 individuals. Examining a five-year growth track, our projections call for approximately 6.2 million new total client enrolments during that time period, of whom 259,000 will be enrolled by and benefit from our eServices platform tools.

COVID-19 forced m2m to assess annual goals in relation to the pandemic’s impact on our operations and finances. While we could dwell on the negative—especially when battling an insidiously shifting public health target—we’d rather recognize how the pandemic positively affected m2m.

Our immediate goal is to scale eServices—which weren’t previously planned until 2022—throughout our operational countries, and use the power of technology to establish connections with tens of thousands more clients.

We believe inequality is the defining challenge of our times. We’ve proven our model reduces and eliminates multiple, related inequalities—healthcare access, gender, economic opportunity. As we help shepherd an end to pediatric AIDS during the next five years, we want this achievement to propel m2m’s Peer Mentor Model to the forefront of community health in low- and middle-income countries, and wherever marginalized populations struggle with health disparities.

To get there, we’ll define and answer three BIG questions:

1. What is our ultimate aim for the recognition, integration, and certification of m2m Peer Mentors as community health workers?

2. How do we continue to grow beyond our current implementation role while maintaining a strong evidence base with quality and effectiveness?

3. What is our vision and scope for the peer mentor approach, and for peer mentors’ efforts in delivering quality health care? We’ll examine whether our Peer Mentor Model is specific to and/or limited to chronic diseases or our existing health focus areas. Can we pivot into primary care or world-class behavioral-based quality health care?

The chief barriers are focus and direction. Not m2m’s, but rather that of governments, multinational agencies, and global donors redirecting their attention, policies, and funding priorities from HIV/AIDS. We expect precipitous declines in HIV funding in 2021, on top of the $1 billion decrease in global AIDS response investments from 2017 to 2018.

If UNAIDS/World Health Organization predictions of 500,000 excess deaths due to COVID-19 service disruptions become reality, HIV-related mortality rates would return to levels not seen since 2010. Other analyses indicate some nations could experience double the number of babies contracting HIV from their mothers.

We believe we must double down to ensure this doubling does not occur. We absolutely cannot backtrack on decades of progress.

Beyond the pandemic, there are other worrying trends that could impede m2m from reaching our long-term goals. In 2019, UNAIDS issued a report that said:

• "There is unequal and uneven progress in stopping new HIV infections and AIDS-related deaths globally."
• "There has been insufficient and slow progress in reducing new HIV infections among young people and adults.”
• "There is a collective failure in making available the resources needed for the AIDS response."
• "The global community has slipped into a state of dangerous complacency about the epidemic."
• "Discriminatory attitudes toward people living with HIV and criminal laws against key populations push people to the margins of society."

The VMMP’s scalability and intended outcomes also face a barrier that not all of our clients have Internet connections or can afford smartphones.

For the financial barriers specifically driven by COVID-19, m2m established a cross-continental emergency resource mobilization initiative to source new funding to support our frontline staff designated as “essential health workers” by governments. We absolutely cannot, and will not, send Mentor Mothers into communities and health facilities without personal protective equipment and sanitization resources, as well as daily health status monitoring.

Of course, this response takes funding…money not in our 2020 budget.

Beyond COVID-19, m2m is taking a variety of approaches to overcome the other noted barriers.

In many countries, HIV/AIDS is now being managed more as a chronic disease rather than as an emergency. In 2018, approximately 23 million people globally living with HIV were accessing daily antiretroviral medications. With our successes in identifying those living with HIV and helping them access medical treatment, roles will continue to shift to chronic disease management techniques via our community health worker model.

This shift though has resulted in a type of “the HIV epidemic is over” complacency within the international donor community, so we’re making efforts to bring the spotlight back to HIV/AIDS public health issues, including:

• Devising new approaches to public and private investment in our organization
• Evolving public-private partnership programming which is proving to be highly robust in attacking specific aspects of the HIV epidemic
• Bolstering advocacy-oriented communications
• Exploring how the private sector can support us with market-based options for public health challenges, such as through providing technology and supply chain solutions

To deliver m2m’s services and impact, we annually partner with a broad array of global bilateral government agencies and health ministries, multilateral organizations such as UNICEF, dozens of other NGOs, and private-sector firms.

While we work with them in a variety of manners—for example, as the prime contractor or sub-prime contractor on USAID, DFID, and U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention programming—we’d like to highlight a unique component of our business model as an example for your questions: Providing technical assistance to African health ministries so that they, in turn, can then apply and scale our proven, peer-based Mentor Mother Model utilizing their own resources and personnel.

We train health agencies and other NGO community health workers on how to use peer mentoring to help eliminate transmission of HIV, reduce maternal and child mortality, and improve maternal and child health. We share our educational material, provide organizational structure advice, and teach them how to monitor and evaluate the impact and effectiveness of their outcomes. This assistance creates a powerful, measurable magnifier effect for m2m’s Peer Mentor Model, and has been formally adopted at national level in Kenya and national and provincial levels in South Africa.

In addition, we have cultivated other highly successful technical assistance relationships addressing many types of reproductive, maternal, newborn, and child health challenges with health ministries in Angola, Eswatini, Ghana, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia.

The African Union called for an additional two million community health workers to be employed on the continent by 2020. The World Health Organization projects Africa will need six million more health workers by 2030.

And this was prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.

m2m’s business model applies five essential ingredients to reach more than one million clients annually. We call it our “secret sauce.”

1.Peer Mentor Model: m2m employs and trains women living with HIV as community health workers called Mentor Mothers. Our solutions all start with one human simply connecting with another over shared realities and common experiences, which then creates trusted relationships leading to lifesaving education and medical care.

2. On-the-Ground Sustainability: Every Mentor Mother is a paid, professional health worker. Their work not only benefits their local communities, but provides critical income for their own families. We’ve employed more than 11,000 women as Mentor Mothers.

3. Sustained Client Relationships: Given their relationships, m2m’s Mentor Mothers help clients access lifesaving HIV medications, remain in care, and adhere to medical regimens.

4. Data Collection & Analysis: m2m’s rigorous data collection, measurement, and analysis protocols pinpoint the impact we’re making on lives and in communities, and help identify where public health needs are greatest.

5. Integrated Service Platform: To most effectively support our vision of health, hope, and an HIV-free future, we employ community- and facility-based health workers in order to reach last kilometer clients. Our new eServices project is the next level for amplifying our impact.

From a big picture perspective, our Cape Town-based Business Development team provides global support for reaching our fundraising goals, and raises the majority of m2m’s restricted revenues from bilateral and multilateral public agencies.

This team develops proposals that reflect the needs of the communities where we work, and simultaneously addresses the complex proposals issued by governments, as well as individualized requests from dozens of corporate and foundation funders annually.

We also have fundraising entities in the United States and United Kingdom which focus on creating deep, long-lasting relationships with philanthropic foundations, corporations, individuals, family investment offices, and trusts.

Underlying the fundraising are m2m’s finance and operations teams which direct capital flows and expenditures across country programs, and monitor financial compliance and reporting requirements within each grant and donation.

To start, we’re funding the launch of our new eServices projects from existing budgets. However, to scale the VMMP and deliver its intended impact to millions more people throughout Africa will require additional funding. Our Business Development and global Resource Mobilization teams are actively researching and prospecting fundraising options from a broad spectrum of sources worldwide.

Because the VMMP addresses and supports COVID-19 response, recovery, and resilience, we are also exploring how to best capitalize on the many new funding sources established to assist organizations with pandemic solutions like ours. Long term, by demonstrating the impact and cost-effectiveness of our work and the VMMP, we’re strategizing how we can be directly reimbursed by host governments or through health insurance service fees.

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, m2m’s Emergency Response Management Team has actively pursued funding to support eServices, purchase personal protective equipment for our Mentor Mothers and the health workers who work alongside them, and to support staff with COVID-19-related medical and funeral expenses.

Since March 2020, we have secured more than $1.6 million through grants and donations from existing partners such as LGT Venture Philanthropy, Hilton Foundation, Michael and Susan Dell Foundation, AIDS Healthcare Foundation, the Bickerstaff Family Foundation, and the Lucille Foundation. Our team is actively working to secure additional funds and has submitted support proposals to more than a dozen corporations, corporate foundations, and family foundations, with additional requests planned for the future.

Donor

Amount (USD)

Global Giving - 75,000

Vodafone Americas Foundation - 10,000

Bickerstaff Family Foundation - 100,000

Beaufort Properties - 690.00

United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) South Africa - 28,000

United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) - Head Office - 13,657

Souter Charitable Trust - 3,868

Conrad N. Hilton Foundation - 10,000

AIDS Healthcare Foundation - 12,000

Imago Dei Fund - 15,000

MAC Cosmetics -30,000

Lucille Foundation - 32,236

Skoll Foundation - 50,000

Medtronic Foundation - 87,850

Gilead Sciences, Inc. - 100,000

Stavros Niarchos Foundation - 193,417

The Michael & Susan Dell Foundation - 368,990

Anonymous - 500,000

Total - 1,602,018

To continue serving our clients throughout sub-Saharan Africa during the COVID-19 pandemic, we need approximately $5.5 million through grants and donations to support our eServices development and implementation, personal protection equipment, and emergency response fund.

The need is now. This funding will allow us the flexibility to respond to the pandemic as it unfolds, and help us cover Mentor Mothers’ salaries and benefits if it becomes impossible for them to work. Since our Mentor Mothers are often the sole breadwinners in their families, their salaries are critical to their family’s financial and physical wellbeing.

VMMP project start-up costs

Start-up costs (eg: VMMP build, launch, translation services& license fees) - $330,000

Training of Country teams on VMMP - $62,300

Consultant costs - $66,667

Cellphones, tablets - $277,500

Data and Voice bundles - $666,000

Hosting and related costs - $132,000

Indirect Costs - $391,289

Total - $1,925,756

Please allow us to share a story about a young Zambian woman named Lukundo with big dreams for herself and unborn child.

Every day, she joyfully thought about raising her child with advantages she didn’t experience during her own upbringing.

But one day at a routine pre-natal exam, Lukundo tested positive for HIV, and those dreams instantly collapsed. Following the diagnosis, Lukundo’s husband left her, her family treated her with disdain, friends avoided her, and she feared her baby would be born with HIV. Lukundo’s self-confidence eroded into despair, and she lost hope.

Not long afterwards, Lukundo met an m2m Mentor Mother who shared her own story of living with HIV, prepared her for safe childbirth, and helped Lukundo regain a sense of hope and self-worth.

Because of that peer mentorship, Lukundo initiated and adhered to her anti-retroviral medication treatment, and gave birth to an HIV-free son.

And as a result of this experience, Lukundo became a Mentor Mother herself. Being a professional health worker not only provided income for her growing family, but helped Lukundo regain her voice and educate others in her community about HIV, family planning, proper nutrition, and early childhood development milestones.

Until finally, m2m’s mobile telephone eServices allowed Lukundo to reach even more people so they too could receive the same medications that saved her life and stopped HIV’s transmission to her son. And those eServices grew and grew, until one day pediatric AIDS became history.

That’s why we’re applying for the Elevate Prize.

Innovation and big thinking are in m2m’s DNA. Yet we also recognize that external audiences can add valuable perspectives to support continual operational improvements and new breakthroughs. We see three areas where we could use partnership support.

First, access to legal partners and related advice would be useful as m2m expands its services. The nature of our work and our complicated infrastructure means increased exposure to risk, specifically as we move into the health services arena. 

Next, m2m could benefit from mentors experienced in rolling out large-scale technology solutions in developing nations, and who can coach us as we build and drive digital health transformation through our eServices platform.

Finally, we would like to expand the professional and racial diversity within our corporate advisory and board member ranks to help us address global megatrends affecting our organization and clients, including rapid urbanization, climate change, and widespread demographic and social changes.

Among the keys to m2m’s immediate and long-term ambitions are linkages with organizations and institutions that not only share our vision for amplifying the right to quality healthcare, but can help us achieve milestones throughout that journey.

For eServices, we’d like to partner with tech companies such as Samsung and Apple to help us drill down on how best to capture user attention and engage interaction with mobile platforms, and for example, how to create eServices packages targeted toward various health issues.

As we continue to expand the VMMP, the gaming industry could be a remarkable partner in helping m2m create “stickiness” and individualized health goals completion using e-platform technologies.

With our sights on universal health coverage, we could link with insurance companies such as Kaiser, CIGNA, and Discovery to first ascertain how m2m’s community health worker services can be costed and viewed as an insurable benefit, and from there, how to potentially create third-party reimbursement plans or packages of care for additional revenue.

From product and services perspectives, partnerships with health product companies could range from marketing tie-in support for their products, to linking with their corporate social responsibility initiatives, and even co-investment in new m2m programs. And with medical services firms, we envision opportunities for aligning and generating fee-for-service revenue streams. Finally, we’d like to collaborate with universities to research and build artificial intelligence systems that can help end the unnecessary annual deaths of tens of millions of people simply from lack of access to primary healthcare services.