AUA Hosts Initiative Webinar on Commercial Determinants of Health
2 min readYEREVAN, Armenia — On June 2, 2022, the American University of Armenia (AUA) Open Center for Transformative Health Solutions and Turpanjian College of Health Sciences, in collaboration with the National Institute of Health named after Academician Avdalbekyan, continued the series of Initiative Webinars addressing the topic of Commercial Determinants of Health (CDoH).
The event brought together more than 100 participants, including public health practitioners, researchers, physicians, and nurses across the country, to explore the concept of CDoH, its drivers and circumstances, and to discuss approaches for addressing them.
The webinar featured Nino Paichadze, M.D., MPH, assistant research professor in the Department of Global Health, and associate director of the Center on Commercial Determinants of Health at the Milken Institute School of Public Health, the George Washington University. Her research focuses on non-communicable diseases (NCDs), injury prevention, digital health, and research capacity development in low and middle-income countries. Dr. Paichadze’s research examines the utilization of mobile technologies for optimizing data systems on NCDs and associated risk factors and understanding the impact of commercial determinants on health outcomes. She holds a master’s degree in Public Health from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, where she also completed her postdoctoral fellowship, and a medical degree from Tbilisi State University, Georgia.
During the Webinar, Dr. Paichadze presented the global burden of NCDs and injuries, emphasizing that the complex and multifactorial etiology of NCDs is influenced by a wide range of individual, social, environmental, political, cultural, economic, and commercial determinants. She then provided various definitions of the commercial determinants, singling out the UN definition, according to which “The commercial determinants of health are the commercial conditions, actions, and omissions that affect health. Commercial determinants arise in the context of the provision of goods or services for payment and include commercial activities, as well as the environment in which commerce takes place.”
Dr. Paichadze also talked about the various tactics of corporations, including political and financial considerations, public relations, advertising of products and services, as well as legal tactics, duly elaborating on each of the tactics in greater detail.
The Open Center for Transformative Health Solutions provides transdisciplinary education and collaborative experiences and stimulates collaborations outside the traditional public health disciplines to develop solutions to complex health problems modern societies face.
The AUA Turpanjian College of Health Sciences works actively to improve population health and health services in Armenia and the region through interdisciplinary education and development of health professionals to be leaders in public health, health services research, and evaluation, health care delivery, and management.