| Features | Spring 2008 |
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Change of Address Despite unprecedented new financial resources and medical advances, a significant global health delivery gap prevents care from consistently Effective and consistent care delivery is, in many ways, a managerial challenge: In poor settings especially, its success depends on understanding the multiple factors that affect complex health systems, as well as the ability to carry out basic public health functions, accommodate multiple medical specialties, and mobilize staff, facilities, and information over sustained periods. Yet efforts to capture and learn from program experiences have been limited, leaving global health implementers isolated, with little opportunity to learn from colleagues’ experiences or to share their own. GHD aims to create such opportunities by—for the first time—systematically evaluating the outcomes of care delivery projects worldwide and sharing them with other global health implementers. To jumpstart this initiative, GHD is developing a new generation of tools that not only use rigorous analysis, but also draw on numerous disciplines, web-based information-sharing communities, and partnerships with centers of excellence in health care delivery. In doing so, GHD has taken a lesson from Harvard Business School by creating analytic frameworks, including in-depth field case studies that document the best and most challenging examples of health care implementation. Ten such case studies have been completed, with 25 more planned for the next two years. The project’s online presence, GHDonline, is just as critical. The website’s virtual communities of practice connect health care implementers across borders. By joining the communities, implementers throughout the world can rapidly share their best practices and experiences, collaborate with peers both locally and internationally, and access an extensive library of practical information. And a targeted custom search engine allows members to quickly find relevant information without weeding through standard search results. The first four GHDonline communities to become active now center on tuberculosis infection control, patient adherence and retention, drug-resistant tuberculosis, and health information technology. But current health care implementers aren’t the only focus of GHD. A new academic field of global health delivery studies will teach tomorrow’s global health leaders to become experts in health care implementation. A curriculum is being developed to reach a range of students—including undergraduates, graduate students, physicians, and mid-career global health implementers—in the United States and around the world. Using GHD’s in-depth global health case studies, this new curriculum is being piloted at Harvard before being made widely available. GHD plans to partner with a number of centers of excellence to create hubs for collaborations that link academic institutions, nongovernmental organizations, and public sector health care delivery organizations. Such partnerships will allow faculty to study care delivery at leading global health sites and to teach their findings to students. These training sites will also offer programming as diverse as field internships for graduate students, sessions for large groups of community health workers, and executive education leadership courses for mid-career professionals. GHD expects to establish three partnerships with centers of excellence during the next five years. To learn more about the Global Health Delivery Project, visit www. globalhealthdelivery.org. Photo caption: Orphans hold candles of remembrance during a ceremony marking World AIDS Day in Johannesburg, South Africa. Photo: Kim Ludbrook/EPA/Corbis |
reaching the patients who need it most. To remedy the situation, Jim Yong Kim ’86, chairman of Harvard Medical School’s Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, teamed with Paul Farmer ’90, a cofounder with Kim of Partners In Health, and Michael Porter, a Harvard Business School professor who leads in the field of strategy for complex organizations, to launch the Global Health Delivery Project (GHD). Their goal: to transform global health delivery from a series of small, well-intentioned but disconnected efforts to a worldwide movement based on twenty-first–century technology, standards, and efficiency.
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