CareWays Collaborative Inc.
The Challenge
In 2007, a small team of Harvard-trained pediatric surgeons and healthcare providers created Operation Airway, a non-profit formed under the auspices of Mass General Hospital dedicated to addressing pediatric surgical needs in under-resourced countries in Latin America. Their model was unique, focused on the teaching of multi-disciplinary care by matching international doctor with local doctor, nurse with nurse, therapist with therapist, etc. The end goal was to build a sustainable local program capable of performing these complex surgeries on their own and then caring for their patients afterwards, such that the International team would no longer be needed after 3-5 years (unlike most other international medical missions). Since that time, the team has conducted multiple “missions” across several countries, and proved categorically that their model can reduce pediatric mortality by up to 30%. With that success in mind, the team posed a question; “How can we best scale this model across more countries and potentially the globe?”
The Solution
The Operation Airway team engaged Vaughn Advisory to help assess their strategic options and map out a plan for the global expansion of the organization’s work. Our strategic process led to the identification of a few potential opportunities:
Expanding the organizations fundraising and executional opportunities by creating some independence from Mass General Hospital while maintaining a very close relationship
Further developing the model of care to allow for rapid scaling across multiple countries
Restructuring the organization, as a complement to Operation Airway, to allow for independent fundraising, attracting incremental expertise, creating innovative local and global partnerships, and executing improved governance over the team’s activities.
Our approach led us to look at other organizations that had rapidly and successfully scaled based on a single, repeatable model of product delivery. We discovered that the concept of creating a “network effect” of expansion (versus the existing “hub and spoke” model) could be highly effective and efficient at achieving the team’s global growth aspirations. Rather than relying solely on the Boston-based team (the “hub”) to travel and train local medical teams in each country (the “spokes”), we proposed a model where each local team, with the proper training and certification process, could themselves become another hub, and repeat the surgical, training and certification processes for another set of teams across their region. And so on, and so on and so on…
CareWays Collaborative, Inc. was born.
We established a standalone 501c(3) non-profit to create the network and serve as the funding and governance body. We worked with the founding team members to create a Board of Directors, write the by-laws, establish a fundraising process and infrastructure, develop the business model, plan the marketing strategy and initiate the launch.
Most importantly, we worked alongside the team and board for over a year to ensure they had the organization and strategy implemented and in full operation on their own.
They are now collaborating with teams across six countries in Latin America and have “certified” one additional team now ready to help grow their impact both geographically and on pediatric health outcomes.