Lessons from the Mayo Clinic: Can design thinking help global health delivery?


Dateline: November 2011 Location: MIT Sloan by MIT Sloan student David Xie Summary This essay reflects on the strength, outcome and challenges associated with the Mayo Clinic’s design thinking approach to improving healthcare delivery, and discusses the merit of applying design thinking towards improving global healthcare delivery especially in resource poor settings. The essay concludes by […] Continue Reading


What is the role of design thinking in global health delivery?


We were lucky enough to have Jose Colucci, IDEO’s Health and Wellness lead in Boston, join our class yesterday for an interactive workshop on design thinking and human centered design.  We’ve spent much time this semester looking at different business models and evaluating the care delivery value chain (see this great article for an example of applying value chain […] Continue Reading


Further down the road with Riders for Health


We looked at Riders for Health for the third time this year, which we here at MIT always enjoy doing. And this time were lucky enough to get a call into class from Lakshmi Karan, the organization’s Global Strategy Director. What makes the Riders model work? Our past blog posts present some ideas (start with […] Continue Reading


Health innovation: Technology + Entrepreneurs + Institutions


A brand-new special issue of BMC International Health and Human Rights features a special collection on Health innovation in sub-Saharan Africa. The papers present examples from Ghana, Kenya, Madagascar, Nigeria, Rwanda, South Africa, Tanzania, and Uganda of how science and technology innovations are connected to entrepreneurship and institutions in specific examples. The very first article takes […] Continue Reading


technology: the glamorous and the grinding


Can we make process, management, and systems a bit less dreary and a bit more glam? So, we’re at MIT, where technology is in the air, and I have my own personal obsessions with technology–witness my (often flawed) forays into twitter, delicious, and too many mobile phones, along with plenty of other tech tools.  Source: http://www.ghtcoalition.org/diagnostics.php […] Continue Reading


Riders, revisited


We looked at Riders for Health last year and were taken with their undeniable coolness as well as the focus and completeness of their operational model. Check out this discussion and related links. Since then, a new study and articles have come out: here’s Fueling Growth by Sonali Rammohan in Stanford Social Innovation Review, Summer 2010: Riders for […] Continue Reading