How do healthcare companies win in the Sustainable Development Goal era? In the waning years of the Millennium Development Goal era, Michael Porter and Mark Kramer published Creating Shared Value and redefined the purpose of the corporation. Not long after, a group of companies joined forces with consulting company FSG to publish, Competing by Saving Lives. The report, still relevant 12 years later, made a series of startling claims to companies involved in health.

Healthcare companies create shared value, the report stated, when they compete on the basis of improving health outcomes for the underserved; in other words by saving the most lives in low- and middle-income countries. To underscore the point, the report shared a shocking graph on the current misallocation of health spending which showed that less than 5% of global spending on medicines went to South East Asia and Africa despite these regions accounting for 41% of all deaths.

To succeed in creating shared value, the report advised healthcare companies to cultivate five things: (1) a deeply committed CEO, (2) a culture of innovation, (3) performance indicators that include how many lives the company is saving, (4) staff with cross-sector skills, and (5) partners from beyond the business community. With these assets in place, the report concluded that companies can get down to the business of creating shared value by reconceptualizing products and markets, redefining value chains, and developing local clusters that both generate and capture value.

Nine years into the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) era, these claims are even more salient. Not only are healthcare companies being asked to contribute more to the most ambitious set of health goals we have ever imagined, but they have never been better positioned to deliver.

Why? Because we have entered a period when economic growth is slowing and an inward-looking nationalism is sweeping across Europe and the USA, causing high-income country governments to pull back from active roles in international development. With stronger growth continuing in low- and middle-income countries, most of it driven by the expansion of private sector finance and product markets, companies are better placed than ever to step into the vacuum.

But with just seven years to effectively end deaths in pregnancy, childbirth, and childhood, stop the spread of HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria, eliminate child malnutrition, reduce deaths from non-communicable diseases by one third and deaths from road traffic accidents by one half, and meet all unmet need for modern contraception, it is only shared value strategies that have the power to leverage company assets at the scale needed to achieve such ambitious goals. In fact, we will need shared value approaches firing on all cylinders in a majority of healthcare companies by 2025 to have even a chance of achieving the SDGs.

But what might the kind of shared value collective impact partnerships look like that can save the most lives? Here’s five examples of areas where the benefits of private sector action could have an outsized impact on health outcomes and the SDGs:

1) Chronic disease control: Medical device, pharmaceutical, and technology companies should join forces to improve the diagnosis and treatment of heart disease, cancer, and diabetes, especially in the Middle East, Oceania, and the Americas. A massive 1.6 billion Disability Adjusted Life Years (DALYs) are lost each year due to non-communicable disease, by far the largest of all diseases and conditions measured by the Global Burden of Disease.

2) Improved diets: Food and beverage companies should join forces with government agriculture, social welfare, and health ministries to build markets for nutritious foods that simultaneously reduce child malnutrition and female anemia without increasing the risk of diet-related diseases like diabetes and heart disease, especially across South Asia and Latin America. Almost 500 million DALYs are lost each year due to poor diets – 200 million from dietary risks like high salt and low whole grain diets and 300 million from malnutrition, mainly among children under five in low- and middle-income countries.

3) Alcohol and tobacco reduction: The makers of tobacco products and alcoholic beverages should proactively engage governments and UN agencies to change their product lines or face rising taxation and other government regulations designed to reduce demand for these harmful products. 230 million DALYs are lost each year due to tobacco and 90 million to alcohol consumption, with the latter also a major risk factor in injuries (transport, violence, and self-harm).

4) Clean air: The companies responsible for most of the emissions causing the shockingly high rates of air pollution that now exist in most countries (e.g., energy, transport, manufacturing, agriculture, and food retail) should invest in the companies developing solutions to air pollution, both outdoor and indoor. 210 million DALYs are lost each year due to outdoor air pollution (120 DALYs) and household air pollution (90 DALYs).

5) Reproductive health: Pharmaceutical, insurance, and advertising companies should join forces to dramatically reduce the risks of pregnancy and childbirth by building markets for modern contraception, healthy pregnancy, and safe childbirth, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. Up to one billion women may have an unmet need for modern contraception in these markets, and all the while they cannot access modern contraception, maternal and newborn mortality will remain high.