Promoting Global Health

Abstract

The third chapter presents the book’s new proposal for addressing the access to medicines problem. It suggests that by collecting and analyzing data on global health, people can come up with new ways to improve poor people’s access to essential drugs and technologies. It suggests utilizing information about medicines’ global health impact (organized by drug, disease, country, and company) to create incentives for positive change. One possibility is to give pharmaceutical companies with the most impactful drugs a Global Health Impact label to use on all their products. Highly rated companies will have an incentive to use the label to get a larger share of the market. Further, socially responsible investment companies could include Global Health Impact companies in their portfolios. Finally, having a Global Health Impact certification system for pharmaceutical companies would open the door to all kinds of fruitful social activism. One possibility is a Global Health Impact licensing campaign. Pharmaceutical companies rely, to a large extent, on university research and development. So, if universities allow only certified companies to benefit from their technology, companies will have an incentive to abide by Global Health Impact standards.