Health Is Our Business

The secrets to delivering quality, equitable, and affordable health care remain elusive. To better channel its expertise toward the ongoing transformation of health care, MIT Sloan School of Management has launched the MIT Sloan Initiative for Health Systems Innovation (HSI). Bringing together faculty, researchers, and practitioners from across MIT and around the world, HSI will work to transform health systems in communities across the globe, and to achieve affordable and equitable health services everywhere.

Leveraging MIT Sloan’s management and analytical expertise and the broad resources of the MIT community, HSI will create multidisciplinary teams to tackle big system-level challenges in health management. Project plans include an action learning and research-driven degree that will place students at the frontline of health care delivery, and non-degree educational programs to train current and future health industry leaders. HSI will also work to quantify the effects that wellness, healthy food, and safe communities and workplaces can have in managing health and controlling its overall societal cost.

The initiative has already yielded tangible results. The Operating Room study by Retsef Levi, MIT Sloan’s J. Spencer Standish Professor of Operations Management, has yielded dramatic improvements in operating room utilization and scheduling. Joseph Doyle, the Erwin H. Schell Professor of Management, has applied microeconomic theory and empirical methods to health care policy and achieved improved health outcomes. HSI’s Healthcare Lab (H-lab) has helped a startup company adapt Google Glass for use by autistic children, and developed software and apps that smooth wait times for physician appointments.

Published in April 2016.