In our quest to develop the next generation of social impact leaders, CASE’s work doesn’t stop in the classroom. We connect students with practitioners to tackle the real world challenges of social entrepreneurship and translate research in to practice, ensuring that our work helps innovators improve and scale their impact.


To contribute to this important work, we are thrilled to announce the appointment of our first CASE Executive-in-Residence: Sproxil® Co-Founder, CFO and Strategist Alden Zecha.


Zecha comes to CASE with more than 25 years of executive expertise in operations, strategy and finance, and vast experience from work in more than 35 countries, most recently leading Sproxil’s work delivering brand protection and mobile marketing services through their innovative SMS texting service. The service allows consumers to verify if pharmaceuticals and other products they are purchasing are genuine, an important tool in the fight against counterfeit medications that plague patients, regulatory bodies, and the global health care industry. Fake anti-malarial and Tuberculosis drugs alone account for over 700,000 reported deaths annually.  Zecha has led Sproxil’s growth, now reaching more than 10 industries, a global footprint, and more than 20 million product verifications to date.


Starting in November 2015, Zecha will serve for one year as the CASE Executive-in-Residence and will be involved in a range of activities, from mentoring student teams in the Fuqua Client Consulting Practicum (FCCP) to providing guidance on CASE initiatives such as Smart Impact Capital and the Social Entrepreneurship Accelerator at Duke (SEAD).  In addition, Zecha will be contributing to CASE’s thought leadership work through our CASE Chats, a public talk, and blog posts on our site.   View Zecha’s most recent CASE chat, covering topics from scaling, impact investing, and trends in social entrepreneurship, here.


“Our goal with the Executive-in-Residence program is to provide the Fuqua community with the opportunity to benefit from Alden Zecha’s depth of experience working with social ventures both domestically and internationally,” said CASE Executive Director Erin Worsham, “We are excited that Fuqua students and our team will have access to his real-world experience and insights. This is a fantastic resource for our community.”


Said Zecha of his appointment, “Since Sproxil became a member of the SEAD program in 2012, I have been impressed with the work I’ve done with CASE and their expertise in the field. Fuqua students have been equally as impressive as demonstrated by their incredible work with Sproxil through the CASE i3 consulting practicum. I’m looking forward to working with CASE and Fuqua more in depth over the coming year.”
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Please join us in welcoming Alden Zecha to the CASE team!

A recent panel at the Triangle Global Health Conference held in Durham, North Carolina highlighted the work of four Duke University students across a variety of disciplines who helped private sector social entrepreneurs with projects ranging from cost accounting studies to privacy policies.

Each student project targeted a specific need of our innovators and resulted in tangible outcomes. Presentations included:

• Time-driven activity-based costing. Trey Sinyard, an MD/MBA student worked with Health City Cayman Islands Hospital model (a replication of Narayana Health from India to the Caribbean). He mapped every aspect of the surgical process to build a financial model that enables cost driver analysis at each clinical step and projects future changes in cost.
  
  
• Data privacy policy. Betty Tushabe, an International Development Policy master’s student, worked with MicroClinic Technologies in Nairobi Kenya. She conducted research to understand the state of data privacy in Kenya and developed a policy governing the privacy of health data captured by MicroClinic’s digital operating platform ZiDiTM, used by healthcare facilities throughout Kenya.
  
  
• Understanding chronic care preferences in rural India. Natalie Skeiky, a Global Health master’s student, worked with SughaVazhvu in Thanjavur India. She conducted fieldwork among chronic care patients in low-income rural areas of Southern India who subscribe to a mobile clinic model. The research project measured their care preferences and satisfaction.
  
  
• Evaluating quality improvement interventions in primary care. Karishma Popli, a Duke senior double majoring in Neuroscience and Global Health, as part of a Duke Bass Connections team, worked with Penda Health in Nairobi to evaluate implementation of clinical protocols to improve quality of care. This data helped Penda to refine the protocol training process before scaling. 

Panelists at the conference were asked about how the usefulness of the information they generated. Tushabe said that her work with MicroClinic Technologies will help the organization to differentiate itself from competitors in Kenya and give it a competitive advantage when working with foreign companies. Sinyard said that he is now doing similar work on time-driven activity-based costing with the Duke University Health System and hopes to be able to compare costs from Health City Cayman Islands and Duke. Popli said that Penda Health will use the quality improvement data to scale up their operations and also in advocating for national standards of quality across the private sector in Kenya.


Many of these internships were supported by Innovations in Healthcare, the Social Entrepreneurship Accelerator at Duke (SEAD), and the Duke Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship (CASE) Summer Internship Fund (SIF). Are you an innovator interested in getting student assistance for a project? Are you a student interested in workingwith us? Contact Andrea Taylor at andrea.d.taylor@dm.duke.edu.

This post was written by Karen Ottoni, Fuqua MBA 2016. Karen arrived at the Fuqua School of Business after spending several years living abroad in Burundi and Ethiopia working in international development, primarily with USAID and USAID-funded projects. The experience inspired her to explore disruptive innovations happening at the intersection of business and social impact and is what brought her to Fuqua. Karen’s internship was supported by the Innovations in Healthcare, the Social Entrepreneurship Accelerator at Duke (SEAD), and CASE’s Summer Internship Fund (SIF).



Have you ever been with a loved one who was sick at a hospital and had no idea what was going on? Have you ever felt helpless and wished you could do something to help your loved one recover as soon as possible? Noora Health, a social enterprise focused on providing caregiver empowerment and education, does just that.

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The idea for Noora Health was born out of a design thinking class that its four founders took together at Stanford University where they observed that in hospitals in India, as in many around the world, family members of patients were often ill-informed and ill-equipped to help in their loved ones’ recovery process. The Noora Health team found that the family members were an untapped resource in the healthcare delivery process and designed a program that educates and engages family members in a way that has shown to have an impact on the health and well-being outcomes of patients. Noora contracts with hospitals in India to offer their training.  In one hospital, after training, 89% of family members feel more prepared and confident in their ability to care for loved ones. That same hospital saw a 24% reduction in readmissions for heart surgery patients. Noora has trained more than 25,000 caregivers since January of 2014  representing over 18,000 patients.


As an Innovations in Healthcare/SEAD intern, I spent this past summer in India working with Noora Health. The day that I arrived in Bangalore, India for my internship, I met the Noora Health team for lunch. After some initial introductions, Shahed Alam, Co-Founder of Noora, asked me “Do you want to go with me to Mangalore to meet with our new hospital partner?” Later that same night I was back on the road riding an overnight sleeper bus to Mangalore, a seaside town in the state of Karnataka.


There we talked to the executives and senior doctors of a new hospital partner to ensure there was buy-in to the program at every level of operations. This is a time-consuming task for the Noora staff, but this investment of time upfront ensures that when the program launches, all the stakeholders in the hospital are invested in making the program succeed despite any challenges that might arise. For example, a common challenge Noora staff face when launching in a new hospital is the perception among nurses that the program will take more of their extremely scarce time. By involving nurses, nurse supervisors, and department heads in the planning of the program launch, Noora Health is able to show that over time the program will actually save nurses time. In fact, this is one of the main results that came out of a research study on their impact: Noora’s program has been shown to save each nurse roughly 10 minutes per patient per day.


My task for the summer was to help Noora Health conduct a customer landscape analysis by identifying future customers, gauging reactions to Noora’s value proposition, and determining willingness to pay for the service. I met with executives at mid- to large-size private hospitals throughout India and asked them about how they perceive and value the benefits that Noora Health provides patients and family members.


A key takeaway from the customer landscape analysis is that the service Noora Health provides is not currently a significant focus in most major hospitals yet there is a high degree of interest in enhancing the customer/patient experience and improving health outcomes.


Having studied human-centered design and the design thinking process over the course of my first year at business school, it was incredible to see the real fruits of that process through Noora Health’s work. It especially stood out to me when I visited one of Noora’s first hospital partners, Sri Jayadeva Institute of Cardiovascular Sciences and Research. There I watched the family members of cardiac patients soak up a video with key health information and skills in the local language of Kannada. A nurse intermittently stopped the video to test that the audience understood and absorbed the information. It was clear this was information and knowledge they had never had access to before, and given that their loved ones were in critical conditions, you could see in their eyes how they were eagerly taking it all in.


I spoke briefly with one of the family members afterward who said that the training was very useful and that he didn’t know any of the information prior to the training. When asked if he felt better equipped to take care of his wife when she is discharged, he said, “It’s very helpful. I will take care of her. I want to watch it [the training video] more than once and buy a copy so I can show it to my family and I will show others.”


He thanked the Noora team several times for the training. Seeing the power of knowledge in action helped me understand the value and impact that Noora Health provides. I am thankful to have had the time and opportunity this summer to learn more about Noora Health and speak passionately about the organization’s work to potential customers as part of my summer internship.