Dr. David Yanga: Introduction to Conference Speakers

In honor of the upcoming 2^nd Annual Global Health Conference: Fight 4 Equal Access, I thought dedicating a few blog posts to conference speakers and organizations would be a valuable introduction to these persons and initiatives working towards health care equity.

Let’s start with our keynote, Dr. David Yanga, a primary care physician in Southeast Michigan and founder of HealthScepter.  With the current burdening cost of health care on the individual, many patients in need of drugs—locally—are either unable to afford medicines, or must make economic sacrifices to obtain medicines, sacrifices that may severely affect their quality of life.  HealthScepter addresses this issue.  Through a website (http://www.healthscepter.com/index.php), they have organized current online data on transparent medical prices in a straight-forward and focused way, allowing patients and physicians to see transparent prices for medications, labs, imaging studies and equipment.  This website is a patient’s tool to navigate through the medical market; it is an advocate for patients.

While Universities Allied for Essential Medicines devotes much of their fight to access to medicines in low and middle income countries, it is important to recognize and work in our own country to bridge health care disparities.  Dr. Yanga and HealthScepter are prime examples of this work. 

We therefore are very excited to host Dr. David Yanga as our keynote speaker at the 2^nd Annual Global Health Conference: Fight 4 Equal Access on March 31^st-April 1^st.