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About the Organization

Health systems throughout low- and middle-income countries are often under resourced and strained. In India alone there is a shortage of 2.5 million health care workers. On average, physicians spend less that 2.5 minutes in India and less than one minute in Bangladesh to convey important care instructions to patients. Caregivers often lack the information, medication, best practices, and hygiene they need to care for their loved ones. This leads to poor outcomes in maternal and neonatal health, health complications, high readmission rates, and suboptimal use of health system resources.

Noora Health’s core innovation is the Care Companion Program (CCP), which trains family caregivers and patients with skills they need to care for themselves and their loved ones. Noora Health delivers fit-for-purpose, high-quality, accessible training for post-surgery, post-delivery, and general recovery and care. Noora sees the untapped potential of a patients’ family as the caregiving unit at home and turns hospital hallways and waiting areas into classrooms while also building mobile messaging technologies that support families directly in their homes. It is human centered by design, delivers the right content at the right moment, and has demonstrated impact on health outcomes.

Noora Health collaborates with healthcare workers, healthcare facilities, and governments to embed this new model of care into the health system and establishes financial and operational ownership with these partners. Noora Health envisions a new reality, where families and caregivers can access essential knowledge, skills, and tools to care for loved ones. In this new reality, families and caregivers form an integral part of the standard of care delivery and management and ease the burden on already stressed health systems.

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Health systems throughout low- and middle-income countries are often under resourced and strained. (District Hospital, Moga, Punjab, India)

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Noora Health trains family caregivers and patients with skills they need to care for themselves and their loved ones (District Hospital, Moga, Punjab, India)

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Edith and Shahed co-founded an international non-profit that improves patient outcomes and strengthens health systems through the power of family caregiving.

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Families and caregivers now form an integral part of the standard of care delivery and management and ease the burden on already stressed health systems.

Ambition for Change

Families and caregivers are trained with essential knowledge, skills, and tools to take care of their loved ones and their own health, and health systems recognize them as an integral part of standard care delivery and management.

Path to Scale

This model for family caregiving is launched in partnership with governments at all levels of the health system and is sustained with government ownership and institutionalization of the model.

Skoll Awardee
Edith Elliott

Co-Founder and Co-CEO, Noora Health

Shahed Alam

Co-founder and Co-CEO, Noora Health

Edith Elliott

Edith Elliott is the Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Noora Health, an international non-profit that improves patient outcomes and strengthens health systems through the power of family caregiving. Noora collaborates with hospitals and clinics in India and Bangladesh to equip patients’ loved ones with the knowledge, skills, and tools they need to provide care at home confidently and effectively. Our work prevents newborn complications, reduces hospital readmissions, increases health-seeking behaviors, alleviates stress on health systems, and brings families and communities together.

Edith’s work is rooted in the belief that the best solutions in global health are often the simplest — and the most overlooked. She believes that everyone, everywhere, deserves the agency and human dignity associated with access to high quality healthcare, and that no one should suffer from a preventable condition. Having been a caregiver herself unexpectedly at a young age, she understands the universal feelings of confusion, anxiety, and distress that come with the work, and strives to infuse that level of empathy across Noora’s programs.

Prior to founding Noora, Edith was a Design Innovation Fellow and Entrepreneur Instructor at Stanford University, where she focused on the intersection of research, program implementation, and design thinking in global health. She has previously worked at the Aspen Institute and Population Services International to support efforts around infectious disease prevention. Her aspiration to drive population-level change began as an undergraduate at Tufts, where she received a bachelor’s degree in International Relations, then completed a masters in International Policy Studies and Global Health from Stanford. She has served as an Ashoka Fellow, Rainer Arnhold Fellow with the Mulago Foundation, Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation Fellow, Echoing Green Fellow, and Affiliate Member and Associate Faculty at Ariadne Labs at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Shahed Alam, MD, MHS

Shahed Alam is the Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Noora Health, a non-profit organization that unleashes the power of patients and their family members by training them with skills to improve clinical outcomes, provide care, and save lives. Noora’s programs have reached nearly two million family caregivers across hundreds of hospitals and clinics in India and Bangladesh and have been shown to prevent newborn complications, reduce hospital readmissions, and increase health-seeking behaviors.

As the son of immigrants to the U.S., Shahed saw firsthand the barriers his family and other minorities faced while navigating the health system. He saw the struggles and triumphs of his own mother, who cared for his grandmother through a devastating neurological condition. It wasn’t until medical school that he began to understand the power of informal caregivers; people like his mother who work tirelessly to care for the people they love because there’s nowhere else to turn. From his first conversation with patients and families in the U.S. and in India, he observed the powerful role families could play as a core part of healthcare delivery. These indelible experiences shaped Noora’s core values: to lead with empathy and always begin by listening.

Prior to Noora, Shahed focused on research and advocacy to improve healthcare for incarcerated populations in the US, and he worked on developing low-cost technologies for better diagnostics in low- and middle-income settings. He holds a BS in Biomedical Engineering and a MHS in Public Health from Johns Hopkins University, and an MD from Stanford University. He is an Associate Faculty at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and a GLG Social Impact Fellow.

Impact & Accomplishments
  • Noora’s intervention reduced cardiac surgery complication by 71 percent, newborn readmissions by 54 to 56 percent, and newborn death by 18 percent.
  • They now work in 320+ health facilities across 6 Indian states and Bangladesh and have reached over 1.7 million caregivers.
  • By 2022, Noora will expand to additional health conditions and facilities to serve 2.4 million family members.
Affiliated
Seema Murthy
Senior Research Specialist, Noora Health
Keri Wachter
Chief of Staff, Noora Health
Keri Wachter
Chief of Staff, Noora Health
Edith Elliott
Co-Founder and Co-CEO, Noora Health
Shahed Alam
Co-founder and Co-CEO, Noora Health
In the News
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