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, and learn more about the people that make GHD possible.
An interdisciplinary collaboration between Harvard Business School, Harvard Medical School, and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, GHD investigates the management decisions behind disease treatment and prevention globally. These lessons are disseminated through multiple channels, including open-access online professional communities, case studies, educational programs, and scholarly publications.
GHD’s overall mission is to build a network of professionals dedicated to improving the delivery of value-based health care globally.
In 2007, global health care programs and practitioners had few opportunities to share experiences externally. 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. In 2006, Professor Porter published his book, Redefining Health Care, which 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, GHD 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 30 teaching case studies, each with an accompanying teaching note, online, making them available worldwide at no cost.