Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
We serve as both consultant and multiple grantee of the Gates Foundation, focusing on issues relating to medication adherence, differentiated care, and delivery issues in Tuberculosis, HIV, Dengue, and Malaria in high disease-burden regions around the world.
TB Adherence Survey & Fact Base Development
The Challenge
The Gates Foundation understood that TB medication adherence is essential for positive treatment outcomes, but little was known about baseline adherence rates, drivers of poor adherence and potential adherence-enhancing interventions, particularly in resource limited settings.
The Impact
Using structured, insights-oriented interviews with patients, providers, disease state experts, and other key stakeholders, we assembled a practical and actionable set of findings, which served as critical inputs into the adherence elements of the Gates Foundation’s comprehensive strategy to modernize TB care.
Year
2014 – Present
Services
- Adherence Subject Matter Expert
- Chemistry Manufacturing, and Controls Subject Matter Expert
- Global health delivery and scale-up advisory services
- Advisory services regarding scalable models for technology-enabled differentiated care
Development & Deployment of Digital Adherence Technologies
The Challenge
Directly Observed Therapy (DOT), the established standard of care for TB patient management, is burdensome for patients and negatively impacts retention in care. Alternative adherence monitoring technologies were prohibitively expensive and were inappropriate for TB medication format and supply chains.
The Impact
We served as global project lead for the development, manufacture, testing, and deployment at scale of a highly accurate, highly affordable, TB blister-compatible medication adherence technology to improve patient medication adherence and to enable and inform differentiated care.
Scale-up of Innovative Approaches To Reduce The Burden of Dengue
The Challenge
One in three people is at risk of contracting a mosquito-borne illness such as dengue, Zika, chikungunya and yellow fever. The Gates Foundation has supported innovators, such as the World Mosquito Program, which seeks to protect 100MM people by 2025 through breeding and introducing mosquitoes that carry a safe and natural bacteria called Wolbachia. The bacteria reduces the likelihood of virus transmission, thereby protecting communities from illness.
The Assignment & Our Progress
We advise the Gates Foundation on ways to accelerate scale up of these innovative approaches and to elevate the strategic importance of Dengue. Through a series of initiatives, we are helping to create an innovative vector-control community of practice where innovators can share insights, work together to solve uptake barriers, and accelerate the scale-up of these much needed protections from these increasingly widespread diseases.