TIP Global Health

Every year, millions of people around the world die needlessly from preventable disease because they lack access to quality health care.  Frontline health workers and local health systems are stretched beyond their capacity.  TIP Global Health believes that the only truly effective solution is building strong community-driven health systems with thriving frontline health workers at their heart.

TIP Global Health is a leading authority in developing lasting solutions on the frontlines of health. TIP’s transformative approach to collaborating with frontline health workers, alignment of its work with government priorities, and rigorous data-gathering, enables the scale-up of highly-effective solutions to extend access to life-saving quality care.

We empower frontline health workers to take the lead in creating lasting solutions, and we work to strengthen their capacity, resilience, and hopefulness. The well-being of frontline health workers and the relationship between health care provider and patient is key to every step of our problem-solving process. 

With generous Elevate Prize resources, TIP Global Health would expand our successful, evidence-based model beyond Rwanda and ignite a movement within the global health community- including the United States- to prioritize community-driven health systems that foster resilient frontline health workers, healthy families, and sustained improvements in health outcomes.

I founded TIP Global Health in 2008 to support community-driven innovation within existing national health systems to achieve lasting improvements in health outcomes. As global advocates for frontline health workers, my team and I utilize rigorous research methods to demonstrate the critical role that the clinician-patient relationship plays in delivery of highly effective primary health care. We work alongside frontline health workers, communities, and governments to design, test, implement and scale effective solutions that strengthen this relationship to improve the quality and efficiency of care, foster healthy behavior change, prevent burnout, and achieve lasting improvements in health outcomes.

I am passionate about the potential of quality primary health care to transform individuals and communities. I have over twenty years of clinical experience as a board-certified family physician working with under-resourced communities in Rwanda and the United States.  In the United States, I have experienced the debilitating tension that poorly designed health systems place on the  clinician-patient relationship- leading to burnout, poor quality of care, distrust, and worsening health outcomes. As LMICs build their primary care delivery models, I am a strong advocate for health system strategies that prioritize the needs of frontline health workers and the community members they serve.

Although global health has improved dramatically over the past 50 years, 400 million people still lack access to essential quality health care. National health systems are overstretched, fragmented, and ill-equipped to effectively respond to local health challenges. And our most powerful and cost-effective tool often goes unnoticed and under-resourced: our frontline health workers. As a result, quality of care is compromised.

TIP Global Health was founded on the belief that quality health care starts from the bottom up, in early alignment with government priorities, and with frontline health workers and the patients they serve at its core. For the past 12 years, we have succeeded in developing highly-effective and self-sustaining community-driven solutions that transform health care delivery and health systems. Two of TIP's signature solutions, E-Heza Digital Data Solutions and Aheza Fortified Food, are now expanding across Rwanda, with plans to expand across East Africa in 2022. 

TIP Global Health's model is already informing innovative solutions at the frontline of health from Zimbabwe to Mali on the African continent and from Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, to Detroit, Michigan, and Watsonvillle, California in the United States. With Elevate Prize's support, we will achieve our aim to redefine quality health care around the world.

TIP Global Health's innovative solutions work to solve the most pressing challenges communities face in primary health care around the globe, such as ensuring information is at the fingertips of frontline health workers without interfering with their ability to provide care, recognizing that food is medicine for families living in poverty, and conducting meaningful research that informs effective health systems.

These are examples that highlight our approach:

Hope Research: Hopefulness among frontline health workers and the community members they serve leads to sustained, positive health outcomes. Our research team uses rigorous research methods to prove the critical importance of hopefulness in health system design and implementation.

Effective Data Solutions: Technology must support rather than hinder high quality primary care. E-Heza is a digital application designed by and for frontline health workers to ease workloads, personalize health education, and build trust, so frontline health workers can provide the best quality care to those who need it most.  

Food as Medicine: Nutrition is an essential component of adequate primary care everywhere.  TIP’s Aheza Fortified Food Solution provides uninterrupted supplies of fortified porridge to hospitals, nongovernmental organizations, and community members who then provide the porridge to beneficiaries for free or at low cost.

TIP Global Health's impact demonstrates local and global potential. 

E-Heza serves 50,000 families in Rwanda, and will serve 250,000 by 2022. E-Heza leads to a 120% improvement in quality of care, and severe underweight malnutrition decreases by 27% among children with 3 visits/quarter. TIP utilizes our model to support partners in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania to consider effective digital tools for frontline health workers in their communities.

Aheza Fortified Food has distributed over 6.9 million servings of fortified porridge, impacting over 115,000 children and providing markets for 4500 smallholder farmers. Aheza leads to a 40% decrease in severe underweight malnutrition within two months of daily consumption. TIP supports Partners in Health as they consider local production of ready-to-use therapeutic food (RUTF) to treat severe acute malnutrition.

TIP published the first rigorous cultural adaptation of the Herth Hope Index in a low-income country. TIP guides Henry Ford Health System's similar research in Detroit, Michigan. We aim to deeply inform health system design in the Global South and Global North through this research.

The problems we face in health care today are not just in Rwanda. They are everywhere. TIP Global Health’s ultimate ambition is to help redefine quality health care across the world.