Description

7 September 2007

Paul H. Keckley PhD
Executive Director
Deloitte Center for Health Solutions
555 12th Street NW, Suite 500
Washington DC 20004-1207

Dear Dr. Keckley,

It was a pleasure to speak with you earlier this week to share ideas about the all-important topic of medical diplomacy. While this is a topic of great interest and indeed great importance for our national security and public health, there is – as you correctly pointed out – very little systematic research in this area.

While there have been isolated efforts in this regard on the part of government, NGOs and private companies, none of these have reflected or leveraged a unified and coherent policy approach to optimally leveraging the full potential of medical diplomacy. Former HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson has most notably led the initiative to bring a closer integration of health policy and foreign policy and indeed he can be credited with great progress in bringing both initial and wider appreciation of medical diplomacy. That being said, a fully researched and formulated policy position has not been prepared on the part of HHS or DoS (or other government agencies) that could help to inform, coordinate, fund and guide public, private and public-private partnership medical diplomacy programs initiatives.

To the extent that such programs span the public and private sectors as well as involve overlap between multiple organizations and indeed divisions within organizations, a management consultancy firm such as Deloitte is ideally positioned to develop both the thought leadership as well as implementation frameworks around medical diplomacy for the benefit of government, NGO and private parties. On a high level, developing a body of knowledge around medical diplomacy and proposing a palette of potential policies will help to transform what is now a challenge into an opportunity.

I look forward to your review and comments and would be happy to discuss next steps with you to move ahead on this very important project.

With warm regards,





Enc: Brief outline of medical diplomacy (Definition, Taxonomy, Resources, Outcomes, Recommendations)
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Definition of Medical Diplomacy
In Gov. Tommy Thompson’s Boston Globe Op-Ed piece (“The cure for tyranny” on October 24th, 2005) he defined “medical diplomacy – the winning of hearts and minds of people … by exporting medical care, expertise, and personnel to help those who need it most.”
While medical diplomacy has an intuitive meaning for most people, one of the goals of a research program would be to clarify the definition of medical diplomacy with a particular emphasis on outlining subsets or subissues within medical diplomacy (see below) and contrasting medical diplomacy with respect to what has been termed health diplomacy. For the purposes of this discussion, medical diplomacy can be defined as follows:
Medical diplomacy is a form of international relations in which medical and healthcare assets and resources are used to encourage positive relations between nations and/or exchange specific benefits between nations.
Health diplomacy refers to “diplomatic efforts to enact international health measures”2 which overlaps with but is not necessarily the same as medical diplomacy. The World Health Organization (WHO) is an example of health diplomacy; specific U.S. support of the WHO and its programs may be regarded as an expression of medical diplomacy on the part of the U.S.
This definition has been kept deliberately broad since there are many different ways in which medical diplomacy can be understood and implemented.
Very little has been published in the literature on medical diplomacy. If one does a Google Search on “medical diplomacy” valid results are found only on the first page and my own blog ranks 9th highest on the list.
Taxonomy of Medical Diplomacy
At a high-level medical diplomacy can involve short-term and/or longer term measures.
1. Short-term m