Wine Country's Farmworkers Are Staying Healthy Against All Odds

Thousands of clinics in America have no doctors. The primary care providers are nurse-practitioners – and their results are as good or better than that of the doctors.

Twelve million people are blind in India, and are robbed of their livelihoods as a result. A hugely successful chain of cataract hospitals in India helped its business by treating half its patients for free.

The H.I.V. infection rate in San Francisco dropped drastically after the city increased testing and created programs like Rapid, which immediately offer public health insurance, antiretroviral drugs, and personal counselors for people with AIDS.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, drug overdoses are the leading cause of injury-related mortality. Naxolone, a drug used to revive overdose victims, is only available by prescription. However, private organizations have distributed Naxolone kits nationally, showing that the drug can save lives when it is more readily accessible.

Latin American women in San Francisco have suffered from post-partum depression, social isolation, and chronic stress at the time of their pregnancies. Run by midwives, the Centering Pregnancy program at the San Francisco General Hospital provides patient-centered care, an environment to speak in Spanish, and a nurturing community for women’s group appointments. The results boast fewer c-sections and pre-term births, and an improvement in emotional support and overall prenatal health.

Residents who use a disproportionate amount of health care, or super utilizers, are a high cost for the system. A hospital in Baltimore is following the example of other hospitals and focusing on the underlying problems of super utilizers to reduce emergencies and save costs.

A project to take advantage of Coca-Cola’s famous global reach designed a kit of basic medicines that fit in between Coke bottles. But it turned out that what it needed to be copying wasn’t Coke’s package delivery, but it’s investment in the people in its supply chain.

In S. King County, Wash., the organization Global to Local identified Seattle's ironic status as being a global-health center but having an increasingly unhealthy populace. Global to Local pointed local citizens to a variety of services, using a "connect the dots" approach to treatment.

Project ECHO - driven by a single doctor with a cause - pulled together a team of specialists to develop a model that combines technology with collaborative care and careful patient tracking to help cure for diseases spread to patients around the world through community healthcare agents, as opposed to only specialty centers. This kind of "disruptive innovation" is effectively working to demonopolize health care knowledge and access, and lends to a health system capable of meeting today’s soaring demands for care.

The health problems of millions of Americans are directly related to patients' failure to follow doctors’ orders. Community health workers are increasingly successful in New York and other American cities – not to substitute for doctors, but to help patients stick to their treatment plans.