Groundwork Initiative for Global Health Delivery at MIT Sloan School of Management
The MIT Sloan Groundwork Initiative targets innovation at the front lines of healthcare delivery. In aiming to help improve healthcare for those in low-resource settings who most need it, our goal is to advance practice, our own students’ learning, and the body of practical knowledge that could enable wide spread innovation in healthcare delivery. Our work falls into three key domains:
GlobalHealth Lab Collaborative Opportunity-Driven Projects
By linking teams of advanced graduate students with leading frontline global health enterprises, we design, help manage, and learn from high-impact projects customized to the innovation opportunities that we identify together. Each effort addresses one or more business or management domains within a partner organization, taking into account the needs, opportunities, capabilities, and assets of the organization. Using the format of a full-semester class, GlobalHealth Lab faculty mentors guide each team of graduate student both on campus and during an intensive on-site work period.
Learn more about the GlobalHealth Lab Class
Documenting What Works and Lessons Learned
Download tools developed by MIT GlobalHealth Lab students that are already improving healthcare delivery on the front lines
Three sources of learning are yielding new ideas, evidence, and inspiration.
- Our class on business models for scale and sustainability has generated dozens of mini case studies of global health enterprises that seek to increase health outcomes in innovative new ways;
- Our field projects provide dozens more detailed examples of on-the-ground improvement efforts, including project histories, curated resource collections, and field-tested tools and methods.
- Additional research studies explore the frontiers of healthcare delivery innovations in low-resource settings.
Building Connections with Innovators
As our team works to enable partner innovations, our action research is capturing information and insights about the implementation journey. What we learn could take us far beyond traditional research studies by shedding light on how innovation plays out at the leading edge of health care delivery in low-resource settings, ultimately yielding knowledge that could reshape theory, teaching, and practice. We’re also connecting with our own alumni, researchers, thought leaders, and innovators from the US and elsewhere.
The triple payoff: new field-tested methods for improving healthcare delivery; impactful advances in management education; and, thanks to our innovative partners in the field, better healthcare for more people.
Why it matters
Every day, physicians, medical staff, community workers and their colleagues wrestle with the challenge of delivering healthcare more efficiently and effectively to those who most need it. Many agree on the need for innovation in care delivery models, programs and clinical and back-room operations. Read more
Read articles on the work of GlobalHealth Lab, by Anjali Sastry and Kate Long, published in Health Innovator’s Review (2014) here.