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Bridging the Delivery Gap to Global Health

Dr. Jim Yong Kim: November 19, 2007; Running Time: 0:49:14

About the Lecture

About the Lecture

Jim Yong Kim and Partners in Health are paradoxically suffering from their own success. They demonstrated over the past decade that it is possible to set up effective HIV and primary care clinics in such developing nations as Haiti, and that it’s possible to cure multiple drug resistant tuberculosis. They even managed to persuade pharmaceutical companies to permit the production of generic, less expensive antiretroviral medicines so they could be affordable to the poorest people. But now, as billions of dollars flow into efforts to attack diseases that needlessly kill and maim the world’s poor, we find ourselves “living in the middle of an implementation bottleneck,” says Kim.

Whether from the Gates or Clinton Foundations, or from international government initiatives, money is flowing into new products like HIV/AIDS vaccines, TB vaccines, microbicides, anti-malarial drugs, and surgical services such as male circumcision. It could all “have a huge impact,” says Kim, helping to forestall 10 million preventable deaths per year, but for the increasingly massive logjam in delivering all the care. Why is it so hard to distribute the expertise, technology, resources, to the people in need? There are all kinds of “just answers” that Kim gets: just align incentives; just make the markets work better; just fund infrastructures adequately; just give workers the management skills.

While he agrees that these are all relevant issues, Kim really wants an integrated response. He’d like to see medical schools like Harvard, where he’s on staff, develop the kind of case studies commonly employed at business and engineering schools to dissect complex strategy problems. For instance, medical students today have no idea how smallpox was eradicated – the story of this immense project combining management and epidemiology has been lost as a teaching tool. Just as Harvard Business School was “teaching the Jet Blue meltdown three weeks after it happened,” so must medical schools capture current problems and approach them both qualitatively and quantitatively.

Kim calls on institutions like MIT Sloan to help devise new analytic frameworks for examining and improving global health delivery. “There’s room for a whole new field, health care delivery science,” says Kim, combining multiple disciplines, and developing leaders to advance evidence based strategies. We can’t alleviate human suffering caused by disease “just being the lab, or by doing clinical research.” It’s now time “to build functioning health care systems everywhere in the world.”

Lecture Details

Location: Wong Auditorium

About the Speaker

Dr. Jim Yong Kim

Co-Founder, Partners in Health
Professor, Harvard School of Public Health and Harvard Medical School
Chief, Division of Social Medicine and Health Inequalities, Brigham and Women's Hospital

Jim Yong Kim was director of the World Health Organization's HIV/AIDS department, a post he was appointed to in March 2004 after serving as advisor to the WHO director-general. He oversaw all of WHO’s work related to HIV/AIDS, focusing on initiatives to help developing countries scale up their treatment, prevention, and care programs, including the “3x5” initiative designed to put three million people in developing countries on AIDS treatment by the end of 2005.

Kim was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2003; and was named one of America's 25 best leaders by US News & World Report in 2005; and one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time Magazine in 2006. He was a contributing editor to the 2003 and 2004 World Health Report, and his edited volume Dying for Growth: Global Inequity and the Health of the Poor analyzes the effects of economic and political change on health outcomes in developing countries.

Kim trained dually as a physician and medical anthropologist. He received his M.D. and Ph.D. from Harvard University.

Dr. Jim Yong Kim

Kim's Brigham and Women's Hospital website

About the Host

About the Host

MIT Sloan School of Management

The MIT Sloan School of Management, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is one of the world’s leading business schools — conducting cutting-edge research and providing management education to top students from more than 60 countries. The School is part of MIT’s rich intellectual tradition of education and research.

MIT Sloan began in 1914 as engineering administration curriculum in the MIT Department of Economics and Statistics. The scope and depth of this educational focus have grown steadily in response to advances in the theory and practice of management to today’s broad-based management school.

A program offering a master’s degree in management was established in 1925. The world’s first university-based executive education program — the MIT Sloan Fellows — was created in 1931 under the sponsorship of Alfred P. Sloan, Jr., an 1895 MIT graduate who was then chairman of General Motors. A MIT Sloan Foundation grant established the MIT School of Industrial Management in 1952 with a charge of educating the “ideal manager.”