Last Mile Health CEO Raj Panjabi To Establish Community Health Worker Academy Using $1M TED Prize

Business Insider: A Harvard doctor just won $1 million for a project that could prevent the next deadly pandemic
“…Dr. Raj Panjabi just won the $1 million TED Prize for an idea that could dramatically increase the number of paid community health workers around the world. The prize is given each year at the TED conference in Vancouver, Canada, to make the recipient’s ‘big wish’ a reality. Panjabi is a physician at Harvard Medical School and the co-founder and CEO of Last Mile Health, an organization that expands access to health care in remote areas through the hiring of professional community health workers. Panjabi tells Business Insider that he wants to ‘recruit and train the largest army of community health workers that’s ever been known’…” (Schwartz, 4/25).

NPR: What This Doctor Is Going To Do With His $1 Million TED Prize
“…Panjabi wants community health workers to learn more and do more, so he’ll use his TED money to start the Community Health Academy. It’ll be based in Liberia, where he lived until he was nine, with the goal of going global. Working with educational groups like edX and seeking additional funding, Panjabi wants to use technology to ‘modernize’ the education of community health workers. Instruction will be largely online, geared for the smart phones that are pretty much everywhere…” (Silver, 4/25).

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