MIT LGO Students Apply New Process Management Skills to Improve Effectiveness of Global Health Delivery Lab Partner Organizations

By Dan O'Sullivan

Since 2008, MIT has helped improve health delivery and management worldwide through Global Health Delivery Lab (ghdLAB).

This unique program combines classroom learning and action-based field projects. Each team of four graduate students partners with an organization, applying lessons learned at MIT Sloan School of Management to solve challenges inhibiting the delivery of health care. During the semester, teams spend about two weeks onsite interacting with key stakeholders.

Last month, MIT students fanned out to 11 partner organizations in India, Kenya, South Africa and Uganda. Here are stories from three MIT Leaders for Global Operations (LGO) students who took part. 

loveLife (Johannesburg, South Africa)
loveLife runs a network of programs that blend behavior change and clinical services to fight the spread of HIV among South Africans aged 12 to 24. The MIT team focused on improving the distribution of UNCUT magazine, an important piece of loveLife's outreach efforts.

Rebbie Hughes (MBA '11), Nicole Zenel (MBA '11), loveLife
CEO Grace Matlhape,Tyeliah Duncan (LGO '11), Todd Waldron (LGO '11)

Prior to coming to MIT, Todd Waldron, LGO '11, had worked at Merck. There, he participated in process-improvement projects designed to lower the cost of vaccines and make them affordable to patients in developing countries. He viewed the loveLife project as another opportunity to make an impact in a resource-constrained setting.

As Todd explained, he and his teammates "evaluated the process flow and financials of loveLife's current distribution model for UNCUT and made suggestions for improvement based on this analysis." Their final deliverable was a new model that will help loveLife maximize magazine distribution while lowering the associated costs.

Among the highlights from Todd's stay in South Africa was visiting a center where students receive counseling and assistance in their studies. "Students there told me about the importance of UNCUT in their lives," he recalled. "One student told me how UNCUT was the only possession that she owned and could share with her friends. Receiving the magazine restored her pride and made her realize there were opportunities for future success."

LifeSpring Hospitals (Hyderabad, India)
LifeSpring operates a chain of nine maternity hospitals bringing high-quality, affordable health care to low-income women in India. The MIT team aimed to evaluate and improve the organization's community nursing initiative, thereby increasing customer satisfaction so that more pre-natal patients would deliver babies at LifeSpring hospitals.

According to team member Julia Reed Stark, LGO '11, process flow was the primary focus of this project. "We had to observe the current process, determine the ideal state and pilot our ideas," she said. "We also needed to determine metrics to gauge if the changes we made enhanced quality of care."

The MIT team made an effort to create "champions," an idea emphasized in several operations and leadership classes. "We recommended that LifeSpring identify champions who are not managers, but rather the people who do the process every day," she said. "Our hope is that this will lead to more empowerment at the lower levels of the organization, which will lead to change and improvement faster."

Julia and her teammates developed and piloted an improvement process at one LifeSpring hospital. The organization is now rolling out the team's recommendations at its other hospitals.

Living Room International (outside Eldoret, rural Western Kenya)
Living Room International (LRI) provides holistic care and education to Kenyans affected by HIV/AIDS and other life-threatening illnesses. The MIT team helped identify key issues the organization needed to address to successfully scale up from an 11-bed to a 26-bed hospice.

While in Kenya, the MIT students interacted daily with LRI management and staff and visited with hospice patients. They focused on helping LRI to maintain quality of hospice care in the upcoming expansion and to become financially sustainable. The end result: 10 actionable recommendations that spanned organizational structures, operational processes and potential revenue-generating activities.

Dannielle Rose Sita, LGO '11, said she and her teammates were able to apply multiple concepts and frameworks they learned in their operations courses. She cited LGO senior lecturer Steven Spear, "who taught us how to reframe challenges and walk through current state to identify opportunities for error or waste and project to the future state. I utilized this training to walk the hospice director through potential patient and staff safety risks along with solutions to mitigate these risks." LRI began implementing the team's recommendations in advance of the new hospice's recent opening.

As for her most vivid memory from her stay in Kenya, Dannielle remembered first arriving in the rural village after traveling for 45 minutes via multiple dirt roads. "All four of us on the team heard singing 100 yards from the entrance to where we were staying," she said. "We assumed it was from a church. But when we arrived, we saw over 100 people singing to welcome us to their home. Roughly 70 of the people were orphans from the children's home close by. We each cut a ribbon and received a bouquet of flowers."

"This was an incredibly unique opportunity that was only made available to me because I attend MIT," she added.