Dr. Jim Yong Kim: Paths to Better Global Health

On November 15, 2006, Dr. Jim Yong Kim, Professor of Public Health, joined the Zuckerman Fellows for a talk about his work with Partners in Health. A compelling and passionate speaker, Dr. Kim described how he and his colleagues, driven by their commitment to social justice, changed the dynamic of global health in the 1990s by questioning basic assumptions about what is possible in treating poor patients.

Partners in Health was founded in 1987 by Paul Farmer, Thomas J. White, and Todd McCormack to support activities in Cange, Haiti, where drastic health problems arose after a dam project displaced rural families. Dr. Kim joined the effort in its first year, when he was a medical student at Harvard, and has seen Partners in Health expand its operations to Rwanda, Peru, Russia, the United States, Mexico, Guatemala, and Lesotho.

Kim attributes his commitment to better health care for the world’s poor in part to his upbringing. He was raised in relative comfort, he told the Fellows, the son of Korean immigrant parents who cared deeply about social justice. “Knowing that I won’t go hungry gives me the courage to question the status quo,” he said, “and fight for changes that address the health needs of the poor.”

To help treat patients with multi-drug resistant tuberculosis, for example, Dr. Kim pressured U.S. and global policy makers to make the necessary treatments affordable and available. He told the Fellows that the greatest challenge we face is finding the mechanisms to deliver health on a global scale. To solve this challenge, he is partnering with colleagues at the Harvard Business School on a new initiative that brings the efficiency of business models to the delivery of health in the developing world.

According to Dr. Kim, medical schools aren’t teaching the skills needed to improve health care delivery. Saying that we have settled for bad social and health outcomes for the world’s poor for too long, he challenged the Fellows to demand the best solutions to the problems of poverty. Kim believes that these solutions will come from innovations launched by leaders, like the Fellows, who have a multi-disciplinary background—and the freedom and resources to find their passion and pursue it rigorously.