On why HEOR and not Public Health as most MDs here do, here’s what Dr. Shah had to say about that:

“India is a developing country and it is an unmanaged market meaning that most people are still paying out-of-pocket for healthcare. As 70% of India is still rural, access to healthcare in big cities is pretty great but abysmal in villages. And with this poor access, we also don’t have access to a lot of life-changing medications. So we can read about the Humiras and Solvaldis (med for treating Hep-C) of the world in the literature, online, and in all these advertisements, but we don’t really get access to that for treating our patients. And that is the sort of the frustration of practicing medicine in India, it is not being able to access that. And so, as rewarding as medical school was for me, that point always stuck as to why a population of over 1.5 billion people are not a target for these advanced pharmaceuticals.

The more I read about it and the more I educated myself, I learned that the story of healthcare, by the decision makers, was told in terms on US dollars and not on how many lives saved or societal impact. I was purely a dollar conversation. As not really one to changing the system from the outside, I decided to educated myself to change the system from the inside and thus began my journey to learn about health economics.”

“I will consider my life a success if I enable access to like two or three life-changing drugs to a couple million patients (in India). I will consider my work done.”