No Harm Done

By mid-March of this year, Harvard Medical International (HMI) will be history. HMI—a $21 million-per-year subsidiary of the Harvard Medical School (HMS) that provides health care consulting services in over 30 countries around the world—has incurred the disapproval of several key University Hall figures, those of whom decided to sell off the program to the private firm Partners HealthCare. It seems that many in the central administration, such as Provost Steven E. Hyman and Vice Provost for International Affairs Jorge I. Dominguez, have concluded that as HMI’s focus shifted from medical education to health care delivery, the organization betrayed the University’s “core mission” and ventured too far in to the lucrative realm of management consulting.

We disagree. Harvard Medical International, far from being a cash cow with debased values prostituting Harvard’s good name overseas, has an important and beneficial role to play at Harvard Medical School.

HMI was founded in the early 1990s to accomplish two key objectives: raise funds for what was then a cash-strapped Medical School, and to increase Harvard’s involvement in global public health. Over the past two decades, HMI has proved highly successful in both capacities. After repaying its startup loan, HMI has posted consistently expanding revenues, bringing in $1.5 million in profit for HMS in 2006. Perhaps more importantly, HMI has participated in many important public health projects, ranging from advising a major German medical school on how to educate students to masterminding the construction of Dubai’s healthcare infrastructure.

While HMI is not a research institution per se, it is hard to see why its function is inappropriate. Medical education and health care-delivery consulting represent an important way that Harvard Medical School can share its considerable expertise with the world. The sorts of structural changes in healthcare and medical education that HMI is capable of effecting around the world have the potential to save lives—if that is not consistent with the mission of Harvard Medical School, than it is hard to see what is.

Profitability should not be dismissed for its own sake. While HMI may resemble McKinsey & Company more closely than the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the increasing globalization of health care calls for bold new initiatives, not narrow-minded thinking and knee-jerk responses to programs that don’t fit the traditional mold of Harvard institutions.