Ashish K. Jha, M.D., M.P.H. is Director for the Harvard Global Health Institute, K.T. Li Professor of Health Policy at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and a practicing Internal Medicine physician at the VA Boston Healthcare System.
Dr. Jha received his M.D. from Harvard Medical School and trained in Internal Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco where he also served as Chief Medical Resident. He completed his General Medicine fellowship from Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School and received his M.P.H. from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
Dr. Jha’s major research interests lie in improving the quality and costs of healthcare delivery systems with a specific focus on the impact of policy efforts. His work has focused on a broad set of issues including how best to measure and improve quality, the role of information technology, transparency, and financial incentives to improve care, and how leadership and management are central to the delivery of high value healthcare.
Liana Woskie-Rosencrantz is the Assistant Director at the Harvard Initiative on Global Health Quality. She completed her BA at Wesleyan University and an MSc in Health Policy, Planning and Financing at the London School of Economics and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine under a full Global Grant Scholarship. She is currently a PhD candidate at the LSE. While in London, Liana worked for the WHO and EU Observatory on Health Systems researching incentives for integrated care. Prior to her MSc, Liana studied continuity of Medicaid coverage with CMS and was a Global Health Corps Fellow at Partner's In Health's domestic arm, the PACT Project. PACT worked with US healthcare centers, from Dorchester to the Navajo Nation, to integrate Community Health Workers (CHWs) into primary care. A Thomas J. Watson Fellow, Liana has also traveled to 11 countries conducting comparative research with CHW programs. Projects included: lateral support and referral amongst maternal/child CHWs in Bangladeshi slums (BRAC), psychosocial programming for caregivers of HIV+ children in Tanzania (EGPAF) and evaluation of performance based financing models for Rwandan CHW cooperatives.
Kirstin Woody Scott, MPhil PhD, is currently a student at Harvard Medical School. She is originally from Bakersfield, California and graduated from the University of California Davis with degrees in Neurobiology and Classical Civilizations in 2006. She received her MPhil in Public Health from the University of Cambridge in 2007, completing her thesis on Bulgaria’s public health system. She returned to her home state of California to work in local politics as the Public Health Advisor to a Kern County Supervisor and then later served as a Rotary Ambassadorial Scholar in Nicaragua in 2008. In 2010, she began the PhD in Health Policy program at Harvard, concentrating on political analysis and global health quality and graduated in 2015. Since 2013, she has served as a senior research fellow to Rwanda’s former Minister of Health, Dr. Agnes Binagwaho, focusing on initiatives to improve quality of care. Beyond her studies, Kirstin is an avid endurance runner and enjoys spending time on her family’s cattle ranch in the mountains of Woody, California. She will serve as a moderator in the discussion forum.
Danika Barry is a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (BA, Political Science), Emory University (MPH, Global Epidemiology) and Johns Hopkins University (Pre-Medical Post-Baccalaureate). She is currently finishing clinical clerkships at Massachusetts General Hospital, as a student at Harvard Medical School (MD Candidate). Prior to medical school, she worked on projects with underserved populations in the U.S., Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and Asia, including a partnership with the Ethiopian Federal Ministry of Health and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to improve maternal and newborn health outcomes, and a fellowship with the USAID ASSIST Project focused on global health quality improvement and health systems strengthening. She will serve as a moderator in the discussion forum.
Hailey Reneau is a Content Developer for PH555x. She recently graduated from Harvard College with a degree in Human Evolutionary Biology and a secondary concentration in Global Health and Health Policy. Her past research has focused on the quality of inpatient psychiatric care in the United States as well as evolutionary perspectives on the development of PTSD in U.S. military veterans.
GUEST CONTRIBUTORS
Our course team is grateful to the wide variety of experts who have contributed to this course. In order of appearance, they are:
David Bates, Chief Innovation Officer, Brigham and Women's Hospital (Week 1)
Madhukar Pai, Canada Research Chair in Translational Epidemiology and Global Health, McGill University (Week 1)
Jishnu Das, Lead Economist, World Bank Group (Week 2)
Niek Klazinga, Head, Health Care Quality Indicators Project, OECD Health Division (Week 2)
Allen Kachalia, Chief Quality Officer, Brigham and Women's Hospital (Week 3)
Maureen Bisognano, President Emerita and Senior Fellow, Institute for Healthcare Improvement (Week 4)
Agnes Binagwaho, Vice Chancellor, University of Global Health Equity and Former Minister of Health of Rwanda (Week 4)
Julia Adler-Milstein, Associate Professor, University of Michigan (Week 5)
Raffaella Sadun, Associate Professor, Harvard Business School (Week 6)
T.S. Ravikumar, Former Director and CEO, Jawaharlal Institute of Postgraduate Medical Education and Research (Week 6)
Ronen Rozenblum, Director of Business Development, Center for Patient Safety, Research, and Practice, Brigham and Women's Hospital (Week 7)
Margaret Kruk, Associate Professor of Global Health, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health (Week 7)
Felix Greaves, Deputy Director, Science and Strategic Information, Public Health of England (Week 7)
Don Berwick, President Emeritus and Senior Fellow, Institute for Healthcare Improvement (Week 8)
Julio Frenk, Former Dean, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health (Week 8)
Ed Kelley, Director, Department of Service, Delivery, and Safety, World Health Organization (Week 8)
ADDITIONAL COURSE TEAM MEMBERS
Maria Kobrina is a Video Editor and graphic artist at HarvardX, She graduated Summa Cum Laude from Emerson College with a BFA in Visual and Media Arts and has since been working primarily in online education.
Shilpa Idnani is a Course Development Assistant at HarvardX, and has been a part of HarvardX for about two years. She holds a B.A. in Environmental Studies from Wellesley College, where she specialized in creating interactive computer ecosystem and hydrogeological models. Recently, she has designed, created, and collected materials for wide variety of HarvardX courses including Humanitarian Response to Conflict and Disaster, ContractsX, and First Nights. She will be monitoring the discussion boards for technical issues with the platform and course.
Clint Attebery is a member of the HarvardX team where he develops and produces online courses with a variety of faculty members. He has worked in academic and educational publishing and technology for more than 10 years.
Margaret Lamond, Steven Allardi, Matthew Thomas, and Thomas C. Tsai all made valuable contributions to this course when it was first presented in 2014.