Dear Friends,

Before we get too far into the New Year, I’d like to reflect on the past year and share with you our plans for the future. As you probably know, our vision at the Global Health Delivery (GHD) project is to create a new field that will transform the delivery of care in resource-limited settings. Interdisciplinary in nature, it will bring together the fields of medicine, public health, business, engineering and other disciplines to examine practices that work, test new methods of delivering care, and analyze and disseminate the results to professionals on the front lines. It will take into account challenges that go beyond science – from scarce resources and limited personnel to crumbling or non-existent infrastructure and a crushing disease burden.

Even at this early stage of our work, we have made important inroads. As you may recall, GHD is a three-pronged project that focuses on education, training, and dissemination of proven practices and critical knowledge.

In late June, we launched a unique interactive website, GHDonline, that allows global health practitioners to engage in real-time, detailed discussions and information exchange. GHDonline was launched with four pilot communities guided by moderators who are experts in their fields. The initial subjects – TB Infection Control, Drug Resistant TB, Adherence & Retention, and Technology – were chosen for their potential impact on the delivery of care. Already, more than 1,000 members representing nearly 400 organizations in 67 countries have joined. For practitioners, having immediate access to a broad range of expertise is proving to be a significant resource in tackling daily issues of concern. For example, a pulmonologist in Indonesia recently asked for advice on drug regimen for multi-drug resistant TB in a country where second-line drugs are not available yet.

During the 2008 spring and summer terms, we offered a course in global health delivery at the Harvard School of Public Health. And we just wrapped up the 2009 winter session of this course in which three new case studies were introduced: The AIDS Support Organization (TASO) of Uganda; Building Local Capacity for Health Commodity Manufacturing: A to Z Textile Mills Ltd.; and The Center for Infectious Disease Research in Zambia CIDRZ. We also taught a course for undergraduates during the fall term at Harvard College.

Meanwhile, we have launched an educational program for global health professionals. At Harvard Business School, the global health delivery curriculum was included in a health care delivery immersion course taught by Professor Michael Porter, one of the primary collaborators on the project. Once we complete piloting the curriculum with Harvard and a small number of partners, we will quickly disseminate it.

We have also teamed up with the MIT Sloan School of Management, where its flagship Global Entrepreneurship Lab course, known as G-Lab, has paired faculty-mentored student teams with 13 host organizations working to address a range of pressing health care delivery issues in Africa. With interest in global health off the charts, all of these courses were oversubscribed.

Our core curriculum includes 15 case studies, developed under the supervision of Dr. Joe Rhatigan, which document key lessons in the planning, delivery and evaluation of health care in resource-limited settings. Already, the findings of these cases are being widely shared. We taught a case documenting the development of a model to prevent and treat HIV/AIDS in Kenya at a meeting attended by nearly 2,000 HIV treatment program implementers in Uganda in June. At the world’s foremost AIDS Conference held in August in Mexico City, our team presented an analysis of a prevention model of mother-to-child HIV/AIDS transmission.

We are extremely fortunate that our closest collaborators include both Michael Porter and Dr. Paul Farmer. Michael’s analytical work and strategic perspective have added an entirely new dimension to our work, and we have benefited tremendously from our close connection with Paul Farmer, who has been deeply involved in the development and teaching of our new courses, and Partners In Health.

For the year ahead, we have an ambitious agenda as we repeat last year’s course offerings and add new ones (including a new summer program at the Harvard School of Public Health), complete new case studies, and continue to develop and improve GHDonline. And to make sure we focus our energies on developing online collaboration, we have decided to use the GHD Blog mainly as a medium of communications where we will post project updates and opportunities on how to support our work. We will also implement a “train the trainers” initiative, through which we will share our curriculum with educators from other U.S. and international universities. This will be a highly effective way to disseminate our work quickly and begin to build the global health delivery field.

While we face uncertainty in the year ahead, we are cautiously optimistic about our prospects. Supporters understand that the potential impact of this project is enormous, for it involves nothing less than the potential to save millions of lives. Currently, we are engaged in discussions with several major foundations about significant global health delivery initiatives they plan to launch in the next 12-24 months. In the meantime, we are exploring a range of opportunities to support our work in the immediate future. If you have any questions or would like to meet with us, we encourage you to contact us.

We are heartened by the many friends who believe, as we do, that we must – and can – dramatically improve health care delivery. For the year ahead, we wish all of you who strive to do the same to go beyond the difficulties and status quo by joining the movement for online collaboration and practice-sharing on GHDonline. Know that by answering a question from a fellow global health care practitioner in one of the online communities, you will have an immediate impact on the delivery of health care in the field.

Best wishes for a happy and healthy New Year.