Three Indian-Americans have been named in the Time magazine's 2018 list of the 50 most influential people whose work is transforming healthcare in the United States.
Divya Nag, Dr. Raj Panjabi, and Atul Gawande are three Indian-Americans included in the list.
To set up the list, Time's team of health editors and reporters nominated people who made significant contributions to the state of healthcare in the U.S. this year.
The publication and then evaluated their work on ability, impact, and quality. The list was broken up into four separate categories, including public health, treatments, cost, and technology.
The list included physicians, scientists, business and political leaders, whose work is transforming healthcare.
Nag is leading Apple's special projects focusing on health. Nag's team developed ResearchKit, an open-source app developer for doctors and researchers to share patient outcomes and clinical data, and this fall it proclaimed innovative new tools for the Apple Watch: The Series 4 comprises an emergency response system, just in case the wearer falls and does not respond, and a medical-grade EKG heart-rate monitor.
Panjabi, a Harvard Medical School professor came to the U.S. as a refugee from Liberia, co-founded Last Mile Health to recruit and train community health workers in areas that need local health services. Last Mile's efforts were crucial in fighting Ebola from 2014 to 2016, and currently, Panjabi is building Community Health Academy, a mobile platform for educating healthcare workers remotely via audio and video instruction.
Gawande was tapped to lead a new nonprofit health care venture that will cover the more than 1 million employees of Berkshire Hathaway, Amazon, and JPMorgan Chase. Even though few details 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 a report unveiling the list.
"And yet, real as those issues remain, the field has also given rise to extraordinary innovation," the editors added.
-Sowmya Sangam
