This is an archived course. A more recent version may be available at ocw.mit.edu.
Lectures: 1 session / week, 1.5 hours / session
This course brings together students that span the engineering, business, public health, and medical disciplines and create collaborative ecosystems that will incubate, implement and scale eHealth technologies.
This course is a collaborative offering of Sana, Partners in Health, and the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI). The goal of this course is the development of innovations in information systems for developing countries that will (1) translate into improvement in health outcomes, (2) strengthen the existing organizational infrastructure, and (3) create a collaborative ecosystem to maximize the value of these innovations. Teaching students the science of improvement and scale is a strategy for capacity-building that has not been fully explored by current vertical programs that have focused on providing clinical skills to Community Health Workers (CHWs).
The course will be taught by guest speakers who are internationally recognized experts in the field and who, with their operational experiences, will outline the challenges they faced and detail how these were addressed. As well as inviting them to share expertise in the areas where they are familiar, we ask our speakers to talk about quality improvement concepts such as value chain analysis, operations management and organizational change. We will be taking the speakers outside their comfort zone and will ask them to share the insights they gain in discovering how foundational work in quality improvement can be applied to seemingly intractable global health care problems. To support our speakers, the IHI developing countries team will be assisting in planning the sessions.
The spring 2011 course is an introduction to a project-based course that will follow next fall. In planned future iterations of the course, Boston-based students will be working with students from partner universities in developing countries. The course will connect the students to either government or non-government healthcare organizations that are local to the partner universities. Under the mentorship of our Boston-based faculty, those from the partner universities and leaders from the healthcare organizations, the students will (1) identify a health-related problem resulting from information gaps, and (2) design, pilot, evaluate and scale an information system to address the problem. Horizontal projects such as those in the areas of supply chain and logistics, patient flow, and drug safety, are preferred over vertical programs.
| COURSEWORK | GRADE WEIGHTS |
|---|---|
| Individual classroom participation | 30% |
| Project proposal | 20% |
| Final paper | 50% |
Each class session is organized around a particular case, and/or required readings. In addition to these required readings, related articles have been listed in the syllabus as supplementary "Recommended Readings." Although not required for class, you are encouraged take advantage of these resources to explore those topics that are of particular interest to you. You may also want to make use of these recommended readings for your final paper.
Buntin, M. B., et al. "The Benefits Of Health Information Technology: A Review Of The Recent Literature Shows Predominantly Positive Results." Health Affairs 30, no. 3 (March 2011): 464-471.
Marczak, J., et al. "Addressing Systemic Challenges to Social Inclusion in Health Care: Initiatives of the Private Sector." Americas Society. Whitepaper, March 7, 2011.
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