Doctor shares vision to bring health care to remote areas

April 26--TRIAD -- A doctor with ties to High Point wants to bring health care to remote areas of the world, and a $1 million gift from an international nonprofit may help him achieve that goal.

Dr. Raj Panjabi, a 1998 graduate of Southwest Guilford High Schools, was awarded the 2017 TED prize totaling $1 million. TED, which stands for Technology, Entertainment and Design, is a nonprofit devoted to spreading innovative ideas for global change. It began in 1984 and started as an annual conference in Monterey, California, bringing together leaders and innovators from technology, entertainment and design fields. Today, the program covers a range of topics in more than 100 languages.

Audiences from around the world were invited to watch the annual conference in Vancouver through the TED cinema experience, which was offered locally at the Regal Greensboro Grande theater Tuesday night.

That's when Panjabi revealed his plans to use the $1 million TED prize he won to fund an online Community Health Academy. The concept would use technology to give community members online training and tools to make health services more available in the world's most remote villages, starting with Liberia where Panjabi's family escaped a civil war when he was only 9 years old. His family eventually settled in High Point, where Panjabi was a 1998 graduate of Southwest Guilford High School.

"My family and I are grateful for how the people of High Point received us after fleeing war in Liberia," Panjabi told The High Point Enterprise. "If it wasn't for them, I would not be who I am."

A Harvard Medical School instructor and doctor at Brigham and Women's Hospital, Panjabi is co-founder and CEO of Last Mile Health, an organization that trains and hires community health workers to serve in remote areas. In 2015, Fortune Magazine named Panjabi one of the World's 50 Greatest Leaders. He won outstanding alumni awards from the University of North Carolina and Johns Hopkins, was a Forbes 400 Philanthropy Fellow, a Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation Social Entrepreneur, an Echoing Green Fellow and a Clinton Global Initiative Advisor. Panjabi was named a Time 100 Most Influential People honoree for his work on Ebola in rural Liberia before he won the 2017 TED prize.

Panjabi repeated his father's inspirational words, "No condition is permanent," as he recounted his family's experience fleeing Liberia. The civil war broke out on Christmas Eve 1989 in rural areas. But within months, his school had shut down and rebel armies captured the only international airport. He recalled the day his mother woke him and said they had to leave. The family left possessions behind and rushed to the airport, where they were divided into two lines. The line his family stood in was stuffed into the cargo hold of a plane, he said. He watched as hundreds of other Liberians tried to board the plane but were restrained.

"We were the lucky ones," Panjabi said. "We lost what we had, but we resettled in America and as immigrants we benefitted from the community of supporters that rallied around us. They took my family into their home, they mentored me and they helped my dad start a clothing shop. Because of them, I had a chance to become a doctor. My condition had changed."

When Panjabi returned to Liberia in 2005, he found the country's health-care system in ruins with just 51 doctors to serve 4 million people. "If you got sick in the remote, rural rainforest communities, where you could be days from the nearest clinic, I was seeing my patients die from conditions that no one should die from," Panjabi said. "One billion people live in the world's most remote communities and despite the advances we've made in modern medicine and technology, our innovations are not reaching the last mile. Illness is universal, access to care is not."

With a small team of Liberian civil war survivors, American health workers and $6,000 Panjabi received as wedding gifts, he founded Last Mile Health in 2007 to overcome barriers to health care in Liberia. He was concerned when he first heard a 2-year-old boy died of Ebola in southern Guinea, which shares a border with Liberia. When the disease appeared in Liberia's capital city of Monrovia, Last Mile Health was among the partners asked to help the government create a plan to stop future outbreaks.

In 2016, Last Mile Health deployed 300 community health workers, who conducted more than 42,000 patient visits and treated nearly 22,000 cases of malaria, pneumonia and diarrhea in children. The organization also helped the government tackle the Ebola epidemic in southeastern Liberia by training 1,300 health workers to prevent the spread of the disease.

"Blind spots in rural health care can become hotspots of disease," Panjabi said. That is true for remote areas of North America, like Alaska and Appalachia, as well as other parts of the world.

In the next year, he hopes to use his $1 million TED prize money to set up online training courses for community health workers around the world. Online education platform EdX already committed to work with Last Mile on the project, which can be replicated in other countries.

Panjabi's parents, DuRu and Ramesh, gathered with High Point family and friends to watch him address the Vancouver audience via the live TED cinema experience Tuesday night. Afterward, they said they felt filled with pride, and were elated that his speech followed an unexpected live message from Pope Francis.

"For a moment, I was thinking 'Is he my child?' How he's grown to be this Godsend," Panjabi's mother said.

Panjabi's father was moved by his son's speech, which repeated his own words of advice about no condition being permanent. "I'm blessed," DuRu said. "He's doing everything for humanity, just like Mother Teresa."

cingram@hpenews.com -- 336-888-3534 -- @HPEcinde

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