During her sixteen years at the international nonprofit global health organization PATH, Claudia Harner-Jay has come to recognize the power of public-private partnerships to solve global health problems. “By collaborating with the public and the private sectors, we are able to leverage different competencies, skill sets and approaches to problems, so that cross-sector collaboration can lead to more comprehensive and sustainable solutions,” says Harner-Jay. Throughout her tenure at PATH, Harner-Jay has led a number of high level strategic initiatives and collaborations to do just that.

For example, she headed the commercialization team for a $25m Safe Water Project to increase access of appropriate and affordable water treatment products for over 1 million low-income consumers. Critical to the project’s success, Harner-Jay’s team created innovative public-private partnerships with companies across India, Vietnam and Cambodia in order to execute new distribution models that reach these base of the pyramid customers. This work led to a 2013 PATH Innovator’s Award.  

Harner-Jay also led PATH’s collaboration with Merck for Mothers to identify and advance life-saving maternal-health innovations in resource-poor settings, particularly in Southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. Pharmaceutical developer and manufacturer, Merck & Co., launched the 10-year, $500 million initiative, which is targeting more than 20 countries around the world, including the United States. As part of this project, PATH developed a Microsoft Excel-based strategic prioritization tool to assess and rank nearly 40 technologies for their potential to reduce mothers’ deaths during childbirth and made the tool publicly available. The tool scores evaluation criteria, each representing a discrete element of the technology’s value proposition and overall potential for impact. PATH’s efforts and recommendations led the company to invest in two maternal health technologies.  

More recently, in anticipation of the 2030 Sustainable Development goals, Harner-Jay led Innovation Countdown 2030 to identify 30 high-impact innovations to save lives. The 30 promising global health innovations - featured in an inaugural report - were the culmination of a process that sought ideas and input from thousands of people around the world and involved a three-step process: crowdsourcing more than 500 innovations from developers, innovators, private-sector leaders, and experts across the globe; assessing submitted innovations using a novel qualitative methodology; and ranking 175 of the most promising innovations through a two-step selection process that involved dozens of independent health experts. Her team also developed and applied a quantitative methodology to evaluate the potential cost and health impact of a select list of specific MNCH innovations. [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Og-cudCNjWI[/embed]

Photo courtesy of PATH.