What U.S. and African Healthcare Must Learn from Each Other
with John Sargent D’93, Harvard MD, Founding Partner and Co-CEO of BroadReach Healthcare
Wednesday, October 28, 2026, 5:30-6:30 p.m., McLaughlin Atrium, Raether Hall
Global healthcare is trapped in two failing extremes.
The U.S. market is paralyzed by technological bloat—an overabundance of capital and point solutions that add administrative noise without actually improving unit economics or clinical outcomes. Conversely, Africa is defined by extreme scarcity, where structural barriers and broken funding models suffocate the AI solutions desperately needed to save lives. This is not a problem with a simple technological fix; it is a structural market failure.
Drawing on more than two decades working alongside Ministries of Health across Africa, Asia, and the Americas, John Sargent D’93, Harvard MD, Founding Partner and Co-CEO of BroadReach Healthcare, will explore how future leaders across business, medicine, and engineering can fundamentally rewire these incentives.
By rethinking how donors deploy capital, and challenging corporate R&D to view extreme constraints as a strategic asset rather than a philanthropic exercise, we can build a Global Innovation Circle. To John, a pathway to progress is executing a true scarcity arbitrage—catalyzing capital and infrastructure to scale local African health tech ecosystems and bridge the AI divide, while enabling corporations to open emerging markets and port those ultra-lean, constraint-tested models back to the U.S. to fundamentally improve unit economics and cut through the noise of crowded markets.
Join the Centers for Business, Government & Society and Health Care for the F26 Wicked Problems Series Keynote. This program is like a briefing for a CEO: slides break down the problem and fake solutions, the “expert” in residence introduces a cross-sector pathway to progress to tackle the “wicked problems,” ending with a community Q&A.
Co-sponsored by the Center for Business, Government, and Society at Tuck; the Nelson A. Rockefeller Center for Public Policy at Dartmouth; the Master of Health Care Delivery Science (MHCDS) Program; the Center for Health Care at Tuck; Tuck Undergraduate Education; Social Entrepreneurship + Innovation at Dartmouth
Please note: All events are in-person and will not be recorded.
About John Sargent D’93
John Sargent D’93 is the Founding Partner and Co-CEO of BroadReach Healthcare, a global health technology and consulting company that has spent more than two decades helping governments strengthen public health systems across Africa, Asia, and the Americas. John received an AB in Biology at Dartmouth, a MSc at the University of Oxford where he was a Fulbright Scholar, and a MD from Harvard Medical School.
With a career spanning medicine, management consulting, entrepreneurship, technology, and public policy, John has advised governments, multilateral organizations, and global health partners on some of the world’s most complex healthcare challenges. His experience sits at the intersection of business and public service, offering a rare perspective on how leaders make high-stakes decisions when resources are limited, uncertainty is high, and every choice carries profound human consequences.
About BroadReach Healthcare
Working alongside Ministries of Health in more than 30 countries, BroadReach combines strategy, implementation, and AI-enabled analytics to help leaders allocate scarce resources, improve patient outcomes, and strengthen health systems in areas including HIV, tuberculosis, oncology, and pandemic response. BroadReach combines health-systems consulting, implementation support, and AI-enabled analytics to give health officials actionable intelligence and support evidence-based decisions about how to allocate scarce funding to maximize public health.
Key figures:
- More than 20 years of health-systems experience advising / informing the public health spending decisions of 30+ countries across Africa, the Americas, and Asia.
- Patient-retention models were trained on data from 500,000 HIV-positive patients.
- Models reportedly reached 80–88% confidence in predicting patient risk.
- BroadReach has worked on HIV, TB, COVID-19, reproductive health, and broader health-system strengthening.
About the Series
The Health, Wealth, and Sustainability (“Wicked Problems”) Series will immerse Tuck students and Dartmouth undergraduates in complex social problems and prepare them to be wise, decisive leaders. Each event during the academic year will feature an expert on a “wicked problem” in conversation with a Tuck faculty member.