Today, I'm on my way to India to join the 2015 Stanford India Health Policy Initiative fellows. These fellows are part of a program that designs and conducts collaborative student projects focused on generating new, on-the-ground insight into the factors that distinguish health-delivery success and failure. This summer, the four fellows are Mark Walsh, a rising senior who is majoring in economics; Pooja Makhijani, a second-year medical student; and Lina Vadlamani and Hadley Reid, both rising seniors who are majoring in human biology.
The students are spending seven weeks investigating the pharmaceutical networks in urban Mumbai in an effort to understand how informal providers interface with these networks and whether it impacts how providers practice, prescribe and dispense medication. The fellows are traveling house to house to investigate community preferences for medications.
We'll be updating this Storify page with stories on their time there, and we'll be tweeting from @StanfordHP (and using the hashtag#StanfordHealthIndia) over the next few weeks. I hope you'll follow along.
Beth Duff-Brown is communications manager for the Center for Health Policy and Center for Primary and Outcomes Research (CHP/PCOR).
Photo, of Walsh, Makhijani and Vadlamani, courtesy of CHP/PCOR