Winner: Outstanding Contribution to the Case Method
| Rebecca Weintraub |
Rebecca is Faculty Director at the Global Health Delivery Project; Assistant Professor, Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School; and Associate Physician, Division of Global Health Equity, Brigham and Women's Hospital. Mission
Leading the wayOver the past nine years, Rebecca has helped adapt the case method to teach global health delivery to students in a diverse range of programmes, from public health to medicine, and she has worked to enable other faculty, including those in resource-limited settings, to do the same.
Since 2008, Rebecca has also led GHDonline.org, a network of virtual communities that connects 21,000+ health professionals from more than 185 countries and 7,000 organisations. Rebecca has used GHDonline to unite faculty wanting to use the case teaching method for global health to allow them to share ideas on teaching global health delivery with cases, trade syllabus content, and discuss other issues related to case teaching. MentoringRebecca has mentored students through the case writing and teaching note development process and has invited faculty to come observe the cases in action to learn how to teach them in their own settings. Removing barriersRebecca ensured that as the case collection was expanded, the growing body of work would be available at no cost to faculty and students by engaging new investors, including foundations, government and philanthropists.
Rebecca has also helped to create an instructor’s guide for course facilitators to make cases and teaching notes into ready-to-use course packs. The guides include potential modules, overall course themes, and other information essential for case teaching
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The recipient of our Outstanding Contribution to the Case Method Award 2017 is 
The Global Health Delivery Project’s mission is to create a global network of professionals dedicated to improving the delivery of value-based health care.
With colleagues, she has led the research and development of 36 cases in global health delivery, available online at no cost to the public, with accompanying teaching notes; hundreds of medical, public health and business schools have used the cases.
In 2014, the World Economic Forum honoured Rebecca as a Young Global Leader. She graduated from Yale University, Stanford School of Medicine, and completed her medical training at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.| Director Julie Rosenberg on Rebecca |
Says Julie: ‘Rebecca has brought leadership and passion to our team. Her amazing vision has enabled us to publish so many innovative global health delivery teaching cases that have been downloaded over 10,000 times. She never stops thinking about what is possible and then wants to go beyond.
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‘She also leads with Joseph Rhatigan the now world-renowned Global Health Delivery Intensive (GHDI) programme that brings more than 50 mid-career professionals to Boston each summer to train them in management and delivery via the case method.’| Rebecca on the case method |
I am so honoured to receive this award from The Case Centre – our global colleagues transforming professional education. And it wouldn’t have been possible without inspiration from Professor Michael Porter at Harvard Business School. He has been a fervent teacher of the case method as a means to prepare students and faculty to learn from leaders in the field and he has been generous in lending his guidance to help us adapt this critical approach to global health.
Creating new cases is the best part of my academic portfolio, and it has been a great privilege to interview and observe global leaders who help us envision how to deliver better health to global populations. Key to professional trainingI believe the case method for global leaders is like bedside teaching for physicians – it is key to professional training. Trainees develop an appreciation of the context, the evidence base, and the ambiguity that professionals face as decision makers. As the cases detail how the population demographics are changing, public investment is uncertain, and currencies fluctuate, the student must – on the spot – analyse the data and project how to generate value for patients and populations. Reality of decision-making
The relationship between these various inputs and influences on health outcomes is complex. The cases and the in-class case discussion aim to simulate the reality of managerial decision making—which includes incomplete information, time constraints, and conflicting agendas—to enable ‘virtual experiential learning’. In addition, the cases examine new care delivery models highlighting the complexity of growth, replication, and the pathways to scale. Global health deliveryBeyond changing the way that global health delivery is taught in universities around the world, we will continue to disseminate the case learning method to current leaders involved in global health delivery This includes ministers of health, foundation officers, policy makers, and advocates. We are adapting our cases to leverage the tools of digital media.
Wonderful colleaguesThere are so many who have supported this work: Dr Joseph Rhatigan and Julie Rosenberg, who were wonderful colleagues in launching the case collection; Professor Michael Porter who helped us learn the case method and adapt it to global health; Dr Jim Kim who had the initial insight to the need for this type of work; Dr Paul Farmer who has supported us throughout as an exemplary leader, and all of the many protagonists and informants who shared their experiences and insights so that others could continue to build on their success and learn from them.
Thank you to our team of researchers who have gone around the globe conducting thousands of interviews with our informants. And, none of this could have been possible without generous investors including: The Pershing Square Foundation, The Abundance Foundation, World Health Organization, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Pfizer Corporation, GE Foundation, The Novartis Foundation, The Harvard Ministerial Leadership Program, The Rockefeller Foundation, Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, Harvard Medical School, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights. |
Today, increased investments in the health of the world’s most vulnerable populations have expanded access to essential medications, health technologies, and health services. This unprecedented level of new financing, along with political will and demand, catalyzed public health and clinical medicine to redesign care delivery.
In addition, we will continue to identify the positive outliers in global health, the leaders that have been able to break the implementation bottleneck and generate value for patients and populations. We will continue to share these insights – to inform prospective strategies of how to improve the value of care for patients and populations.
