2025 Concordia Annual Summit

Powerful Partnerships: Lessons from Nepal for Expanding Access to Quality Healthcare for All

  • Health Opportunities & Challenges
Dr. Rachel Vreeman, Dr. Brendan Carr, Dr. Biraj Man Karmacharya

Session
Partners

Session Summary

Important
Quotations

“I love how we are able to build innovative learning health systems together that not only improve health for all, but show us how to do that no matter where we are.”
Dr. Rachel Vreeman
“Healthcare in the United States has always been more reactive than we would like it to be. There is now a major shift in the US and globally toward building health rather than only treating disease.”
Dr. Brendan Carr
“When we talk about innovation, we often think of technology. But what we really want to explore and pursue in this collaboration is innovation in the approaches to partnership.”
Dr. Biraj Man Karmacharya

Key
Takeaways

  • Innovation in Partnership Approaches Over Technology Alone: Innovation in global health lies in developing novel partnership structures that bring together communities, health providers, academia, research, and industry stakeholders, rather than focusing solely on technological solutions.

 

  • Institutional vs. Project-Based Partnerships: Successful partnerships require institutionalizing relationships rather than settling for conventional activity-based projects, creating sustainable long-term collaborations with clear governance and mutual benefits.

 

  • Community-Centered Approach and Local Priority Setting: Partnerships must begin by listening to communities and starting from local priorities, ensuring interventions address actual community needs and are culturally appropriate.

 

  • Focus on Youth Health as Preventative Investment: Youth health is critical for long-term population health outcomes, as adolescent health problems directly impact adult chronic diseases, mental health, and substance use issues. In many countries, 40-45% of the population are young people whose needs are currently underserved.

 

  • Bidirectional Learning and Knowledge Transfer: Successful partnerships demonstrate how innovations developed in resource-limited settings can benefit high-resource environments, such as community health worker models developed in Nepal being adapted for immigrant communities in Queens, New York.

Action
Items

  • For Health System Leaders: Develop institutional partnership frameworks that move beyond project-based collaborations toward sustainable relationships. Create youth-focused health programs addressing the gap between pediatric and adult care systems. Establish bidirectional learning systems that capture and adapt innovations from global partnerships.

 

  • For Policymakers: Integrate youth health priorities into health system policies, recognizing this population represents nearly half of many countries. Support community-driven priority setting in health programming. Develop frameworks for private-public partnerships leveraging academic medical center capabilities.

 

  • For Academic Medical Centers: Build proof-of-concept models for multi-stakeholder partnerships that can be replicated. Establish exchange programs facilitating South-South collaboration. Focus on “natural intelligence” solutions harnessing existing resources rather than relying solely on artificial intelligence.

 

  • For Global Health Organizations: Challenge conventional approaches by asking “why not” questions about ambitious goals. Prioritize relationship building and trust over short-term deliverables. Document and share successful partnership models to enable replication.

 

  • For Funders and Donors: Support long-term institutional partnerships rather than short-term project funding. Invest in youth health programming as preventative strategy for adult health challenges. Fund bidirectional capacity building benefiting both high and low-resource settings.

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