In 2018, Collins Gaba, MS GHPM’24, was a young dental surgeon working in the maxillofacial department of the Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital in Kumasi, Ghana’s second-largest city. The patients, he had noticed — most of whom were from rural, underserved communities — consistently arrived with advanced life-threatening conditions.
To better understand why, he went to the source, taking a job in 2021 as a medical officer in a remote town in the Greater Accra region. There, he witnessed firsthand how poverty, lack of education, and lack of access to health care led to people dying of preventable and curable diseases.
One day, his immediate boss was promoted to head the District Health Directorate. (DHDs promote and implement national health policies and programs in districts, which are administrative subsets of the country’s 16 regions.) Suddenly, Gaba noticed, the man was “attending important meetings and making health management decisions at a much higher level — decisions that affected the whole district at a go,” he says. His interest in research and public health was piqued.
“Even though I enjoyed working in the clinic, I realized there was a bigger world out there, and there was also a wider way to make an impact in health care,” he says. Earning a degree in health care management or public or global health, Gaba felt, would enable him eventually to implement policies and interventions at the national level.
Richlove Mbroh, MS GHPM’23, a classmate from dental school, recommended that Gaba look into Heller’s Master of Science in Global Health Policy and Management (MS GHPM). The program’s accelerated, nine-month curriculum is designed to empower graduates to effect structural changes that will improve health systems and outcomes at the national or global level. Students acquire expertise in health economics, data analysis, and health system financing and organization, as well as an understanding of the connection between global health and international development.
Gaba applied, opting to pursue the program’s data-intensive Health Economics and Analytics concentration, which augments the core curriculum with quantitative electives in data tracking, monitoring, and analysis. That decision gave him even more than he bargained for.
“In terms of course content, from international health systems to research methods to data analysis programs, it feels like a complete package,” Gaba says. “What this program did was equip us with the ability not only to analyze the data, but also to transform data into actual policy. We can serve as a link between data scientists and policymakers because we understand and can function effectively on both sides.”
A.K. Nandakumar, an international expert in health financing and health care policy and research who served as the first chief economist for the Global Health Bureau at the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), directs the program. He also teaches the course International Health Systems and Development, which provides students with an understanding of how health systems are organized and of the economic and political factors that can affect their performance.
“As a clinician I’m at the forefront, taking care of patients,” Gaba says. “Professor Nandakumar opened our minds to the economics behind health care — to the things that influence health care management, including where funds should be directed to make sure a health system doesn’t collapse. That for me was a huge eye opener.”
Seyed Moaven Razavi, MS GHPM’06, PhD’11, a faculty member in Heller’s Schneider Institutes for Health Policy and Research, also had a powerful influence on Gaba. An expert in health care data science, Razavi teaches courses in data analytics and visualization, data mining, and data analytics as applied to health care big data — skills students need to run predictive analytics models on vast databases.
“Professor Razavi taught us several platforms and made sure that we were able to analyze very heavy national- and global-level data,” Gaba says. “He would always tell us his goal: ‘By the time you finish my program, you’ll be able to function as a data scientist in any field.’”
For Gaba, what made the work particularly exciting was Razavi’s insistence that students learn to write policy: “We were not just the guys behind the computer crunching numbers and then dumping them out. For every assignment, he would say, ‘When you finish analyzing the data, make policies based on the results.’” Razavi, Gaba says, encouraged students to ask themselves, “Why are these numbers significant? Why are they relevant? How should we use them to make policies that will make a change?”
From Clinic to Classroom to Lab
Today Gaba works with both Nandakumar and Razavi as a research associate in Heller’s Institute for Global Health and Development (IGHD), which Nandakumar directs. There, Gaba is using “all the programs and all the courses they taught me in school.” One of the three institutes housed in the Schneider Institutes, IGHD concerns itself with the structure and delivery of health care systems, with a focus on helping to shape the World Health Organization’s Universal Health Coverage mandate.
Gaba is applying his newly acquired skills to two grants run by IGHD’s Analytics Hub, which was established with funding from the Office of the U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator and Health Diplomacy. The first project aims to generate, through economic analysis, the evidence needed to increase the efficiency of how the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) funds are invested. (Since its inception more than two decades ago, PEPFAR has invested more than $100 billion in the global HIV/AIDS response and is credited with saving more than 25 million lives.)
The second project is an activity-based costing and management study, or ABC/M, which tracks HIV resource allocation in several African countries. The Analytics Hub produces datasets, process maps, reports, and publications that policymakers and health care providers can use to improve the efficiency, quality, and equity of HIV prevention and treatment. The goal is to help country governments and global institutions optimize their HIV-response investments.
While Gaba doesn’t rule out bringing his skills and expertise to bear on his home country’s health care system, for now he is happy at Heller — a place, he says, where he hears the word “community” spoken every day, both in the classroom and in everyday conversations.
“Heller is a very loving environment where people have a genuine interest in your growth and everyone is always looking out for you,” he adds. “That is a very beautiful thing.”