By Dr. N. Krishna Reddy
As we reflect on the past year and plan for the year ahead, we are proud to highlight ACCESS Health International’s growing impact and expanding footprint. With the launch of our regional office in Dubai and a country office in Egypt, ACCESS Health is poised to commence activities in West and Central Asia as well as Africa, extending our reach across two continents—Asia and Africa.
Our adoption of the One Health and the Whole of Systems approaches has broadened our focus beyond traditional health systems building blocks. We now integrate health security, health system strengthening, and resilience as essential goals. Our work spans local to global health challenges, enabling us to better define level-specific issues and craft targeted solutions.
The launch of the Stop Hep Alliance this year adds to the expanding list of multistakeholder platforms convened by ACCESS Health. These include the Global Learning Collaborative for Health Systems Resilience (GLC4HSR), APAC CVD Alliance, Fintech for Health, Health Informatics Network (HIN), India Health Systems Collaborative (IHSC), and the Special Interest Group (SIG) on Cancer Control. These platforms facilitate evidence-based dialogues to raise policy awareness, spur action, and address priority health issues. Our partnerships with related networks further amplify advocacy efforts on these critical concerns.
This year also marked a significant focus on community-level interventions, empowering communities through health literacy and self-care initiatives to improve health outcomes. Participatory action research has been central to these efforts, with community engagement forming the foundation. These interventions are fostering models for participatory local governance and creating platforms for patients and patient organizations to share their lived experiences and unmet health needs in multistakeholder forums.
The visual rebranding of ACCESS Health this year reflects our ongoing transformation and evolution over the years. It symbolizes our commitment to staying relevant in an ever-changing global health landscape and aligning our identity with the expanded scope of our mission.
As we step into the new year, our commitment to strengthening, securing, and building resilient health systems remains steadfast. In a rapidly changing global environment, we are focused on applying digital transformation to advance core health system objectives. We aim to translate insights from collaborative learning into actionable models that are carbon-neutral and adaptive to threats posed by climate change. Alongside traditional priorities such as maternal and child health and communicable diseases, we are addressing the neglected area of non-communicable diseases in the Asia-Pacific region.
We observe that many countries in Asia continue to face significant challenges, including limited fiscal space for increased public health spending, workforce shortages, operational inefficiencies, and gaps in management capabilities. Few countries are addressing the critical issue of quality assurance, and some are grappling with the implications of a rapidly aging population. These priority issues will remain central to our work in the coming year.
Globally, health systems—both in developed and developing countries—are struggling with coordination among multiple providers across public and private sectors, often leading to suboptimal outcomes despite improvements in access and affordability. Interoperable digital health records, along with defined care pathways and practice guidelines, hold the potential to enhance care coordination. Our efforts in this domain, initiated in 2024, will be further strengthened this year.
While we continue to drive policy attention toward priority health needs, we are equally focused on advising and assisting with effective policy implementation and operational optimization to achieve systemic efficiencies. As we embark on this new year, we remain dedicated to our vision and core objectives, committed to advancing health systems globally.
The author is the CEO of ACCESS Health International.