Best New Thinking: Doctor, Doctor Give Me the News

04/10/25 • 34 min

New Thinking for a New World - a Tallberg Foundation Podcast

Dr. Kris Olson discusses how innovative, human-centered design is transforming global healthcare.

Healthcare is intensely personal. Even when national statistics show improvement—which has been the case for most countries over recent decades—what matters is whether my baby in rural Uganda is having trouble breathing or whether my aging father in New York who went into the hospital with a broken hip will now die from the MERS he contracted there or whether why my wife in Buenos Aries can access the drugs she needs to survive cancer.
In our hi-tech age, it seems like much of what ails us and our loved ones should be erasable using innovative technology.
Dr. Kristian Olson agrees. He's an American internist and pediatrician, based at Harvard, who practices globally, as well as a designer who helped create the Center for Affordable Medical Technology. CAMTech designs solutions—high-tech and not-so-high-tech—that produce better, affordable health outcomes.
Dr. Olson is also a winner of the 2024 Tällberg-SNF-Eliasson Global Leadership Prize recognized by the jury for his unwavering commitment to transforming healthcare especially in low and middle-income countries through human-centered design, pioneering solutions that improve lives across diverse communities.
Tell us what you think: Can smart use of technology make us—all of us—healthier?

This episode was originally published on November 27, 2024.

Dr. Kris Olson discusses how innovative, human-centered design is transforming global healthcare.

This episode was originally published on November 27, 2024.

Previous Episode

Helping Refugees Help Themselves: The Play Really is the Thing!

Filmmakers Charlotte Eagar and William Stirling explore how theater heals and transforms.

Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet, “The play’s the thing, wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king,” when the troubled Prince stages a play to catch a murderer. The underlying point of the play-in-the-play is that drama is an incredibly powerful force for storytelling and much else.
Fast forward to the 21st century for an amazing example of that Shakespearean wisdom. Two incredibly creative British filmmakers created something called The Trojan Women Project to use drama to help refugees from wars in the Middle East and Ukraine cope with their trauma. The idea is elegant in its simplicity: combine the wisdom and words of Euripides’ play with the tragic lived experiences of people fleeing war and destruction, as therapy for them and as a learning tool for audiences who are offered unique insight into what war is really like.
Charlotte Eagar and William Stirling have worked on this project for more than a decade. The Tällberg Foundation first met them in 2014 when they brought a dozen Syrian refugee cast members to one of our workshops. We witnessed an absolutely amazing performance of The Trojan Women laden with a depth of tragedy that even the greatest actors would be challenged to produce—because for the Syrians, it was their lives, not their lines they were sharing.
Listen as Charlotte and William describe how they tap into the real power of the play, and how it can transform refugees as well as audiences.