Advancing the field of health care delivery through digital tools, research, and training programs
An interdisciplinary collaboration between Harvard Business School, Harvard Medical School, and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, the Global Health Delivery Project at Harvard University (GHD) supports professionals dedicated to improving the delivery of value-based health care globally. We support them to carefully consider management decisions behind disease treatment and prevention programs and prepare them to make decisions that will turn investments into impact. These lessons are disseminated through multiple channels, including case studies, educational programs, and scholarly publications.
Background
The Global Health Delivery Project at Harvard University (GHD) was launched in 2007 under the guidance of Dr. Jim Y. Kim, Dr. Paul Farmer, and Professor Michael Porter. (View GHD’s debut presentation given by Dr. Kim and Professor Porter in September 2007.) At the time, global health care programs and practitioners had few opportunities to share experiences. They were often isolated and unable to access the latest clinical knowledge, drugs, and technologies, creating a gap between what was known and available in modern medicine and what was being delivered on the ground to patients and communities most in need. Meanwhile, resources for global health were increasing through large-scale funding agencies such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, and PEPFAR.
The new resources and investments in discovery and development were not translating into improved health outcomes due, in part, to a lack of rigorous, scientific focus on delivery. With millions of preventable deaths occurring each year, the urgent need for a strategic, well-organized response to match the magnitude of health problems was clear.
To catalyze a new field in global health delivery, an open-access, interdisciplinary body of knowledge needed to be produced, taught, and disseminated widely, and it had to be grounded in practice in developing settings and integrated within academia. Professor Porter's 2006 book, Redefining Health Care, imagines a health system focused on the value of health care–or, maximum social benefit per dollar spent. It was clear the new field in global health delivery should emphasize the value of health services, as opposed to the traditional focus on volume, access, and equity of services.
Since its founding, Dr. Rebecca Weintraub has led and grown GHD as it has instructed thousands of students, ranging from law students to national HIV directors, in global health delivery using a unique curriculum and has published a growing collection of 45 open-access teaching case studies, each with an accompanying teaching note, online. Seeing the lack of access to essential clinical information on the frontlines of care, GHD also began supporting clinicians in resource-limited settings with access to evidence-based clinical decision support tools. For a decade, the team also ran GHDonline, where nearly 25,000 global health professionals exchanged millions of ideas about what works in health care delivery in online communities of practice.
In 2016, Ariadne Labs—a joint center for health systems innovation at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health rooted in rigorous scientific methodology and the industry’s best practices for implementation—began to support our research on the program. Then-director Dr. Atul Gawande and the team saw the potential the program held to advance Ariadne's mission—to create scalable healthcare solutions that produce better care at the most critical moments in people’s lives, everywhere, every time. Read more about Better Evidence at Ariadne Labs.
Our portfolio now sits at both Ariadne Labs and the Global Health Delivery Project.