Speaker: Steve Davis, Stanford, McKinsey, BMGF

Time: 9:00-10:30 a.m., September 12, 2023, GMT+8

Venue: Peking University Science and Technology Park (Building A 403)

Abstract:

While the world is being rapidly transformed by the many ad-vances in digital technologies, including the exciting oppor-tunities provided by Al, the global health community is struggling to keep up. Across the globe, particularly in lower-in-come countries of Africa and South Asia, healthcare andhealth systems are a long way from incorporating new digitaltools and models that could accelerate health outcomes andhealth equity, even after the Covid Pandemic demonstratedthe importance of many such approaches. The reasons aremany: competing health and development priorities in con-sistently under-resourced communities, the lack of adequateinfrastructure or data to apply such tools, the nascent dataculture and data policy concerns, inadequate institutions ca-pabilities, and more. However, almost every country in theworld has made a firm commitment to transform its healthsystem digitally, so the global health community - students.scholars, governments, funders, delivery organizations - must now catch up and figure out how to accelerate this jour-ney. From his perch teaching at Stanford, chairing the WorldHealth Organization's Digital Health Technical AdvisoryGroup, advising the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation on itsdigital health strategy, advising other organizations as aSenior Advisor for McKinsey & Company, and sitting on theboards of some critical digital enterprises, Steve Davis willprovide an overview of where the world is on this journeysome of the opportunities and challenges ahead, some pro-posals for moving forward, and how collaborations with Chi-nese partners will be critical on this pathway.

Biography:

Steve Davis currently serves as a Senior Advisor with McKinsey & Company, as a Stanford Graduate School of Busi-ness Lecturer and Global Health Faculty Fellow, and as amember of the Council on Foreign Relations. Steve has deepexperience, including on numerous boards and advisorygroups, focused on the intersection of business, innovation.and socialimpact. He most recently served as Executive Stra-tegic Advisor and Interim Director, China Country Office, forthe Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, as co-chair of theWorld Health Organization's Digital Health Technical Advi-sory Group, and as a Distinguished Fellow for the WorldEconomic Forum. Steve is the former President & CEO ofPATH,a leading global health innovation organization;former Director of Social Innovation at McKinsey; formerCEO of Corbis, a digital media pioneer; and as an attorneywith K&L Gates. With degrees from Princeton University,University of Washington, and Columbia Law School, Steveis the author ofUndercurrents: Channeling Outrage to SparkPractical Activism (Wiley 2020) and speaks and writes fre-quently on topics related to social innovation and digitalhealth. He lives with his family in Seattle, Washington.

Source: Peking University Institute for Global Health and Development