Indian-Americans in the Time Magazine’s ‘Healthcare 50’ list

Physician-CEOs such as Atul Gawande are the new face of modern healthcare

The three Indian-Americans selected by the Time’s panel of health journalists and editors compose of some of the most innovative and successful minds in the field whose efforts have made a big difference.

The Time magazine’s 2018 list of the 50 most influential people in the field of healthcare whose work has been transforming the industry for the better has been compiled and three Indian-Americans have been named in the list.

Raj Panjabi

To put the list together, the Time magazine’s team consisting of health journalists and editors had researched extensively on the people whose contributions in 2018 have affected the people of the US most significantly. The publication then assessed the shortlisted candidates’ works based on their caliber, innovation and influence. The list was further broken down into four separate categories – public health, treatments, cost and technology. It includes physicians, scientists, business and political leaders whose labour is changing healthcare in the US for the better.

The three Indian-Americans who have been included in the list include, Divya Nag, Dr Raj Panjabi and Atul Gawande.

Divya Nag

At just under 30, Divya Nag is leading Apple’s special projects which focus on health. Nag’s team are the developers of ResearchKit, an open-source app developed for doctors and researchers to share patient results and clinical data. It has been announced that this fall, groundbreaking new tools will be released for the Apple Watch. The Series 4 includes an emergency ­response system, in case the wearer falls and doesn’t respond, and a medical-grade EKG heart-rate monitor.

A Harvard Medical School professor who came to the US as a refugee from Liberia, Raj Panjabi, is the co-founder of Last Mile Health which recruits and trains community health workers in areas that lack local health services. Last Mile’s efforts were crucial in fighting ebola from 2014 to 2016. Now, Panjabi is building the Community Health Academy, a mobile platform for training health care workers remotely through video and audio instructions.

Atul Gawande

Atul Gawande was tapped to lead a new nonprofit health care venture that will cover the more than one million employees of Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase. Though few of the details about the NGO are public, it is said to focus on transparent, low-cost corporate health care.

“The American health care system has been plagued for decades by major problems, from lack of access to uncontrolled costs to unacceptable rates of medical errors,” the Time editors wrote in the report divulging the list. “And yet, real as those issues remain, the field has also given rise to extraordinary innovation,” the editors added.