Seminars

A strong primary care system is central to achieving health system quality, efficiency, and equity. In recognition of this, recent and ongoing reforms have sought to strengthen China’s primary care system. Policymakers have little objective evidence, however, on the current quality of primary care or what interventions can improve care quality, particularly in rural areas. This presentation will discuss recent evidence from audit studies using unannounced standardized patients (SPs), considered the gold standard method for assessing clinical practice, to evaluate the quality of primary care delivered in rural clinics and hospitals. In addition to analyzing provider performance, evidence will be presented on topics relevant to specific policy discussions, including referral systems and integrated care, factors driving antibiotic prescriptions, and the effects of civil service versus fixed-term employment on physician performance.

View Dr. Sylvia’s presentation here.

Dr. Sean Sylvia is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Gillings School of Global Public Health and a Faculty Fellow at the Carolina Population Center. Dr. Sylvia is a health and development economist whose research focuses on designing and evaluating innovative approaches to improve the delivery of health services in developing countries. His work relies heavily on fieldwork to collect primary data and uses experimental or quasi-experimental methods to evaluate the causal effects of policies and interventions. In past and ongoing projects, he has studied the design of performance-based incentives for providers, school-based health and nutrition programs, early childhood health and development, and the quality of primary care in low-resource settings. His work has been published health and social science journals such as the BMJ, PLOS Medicine, the American Journal of Public Health, Health Affairs, the Journal of Labor Economics, Journal of the European Economic Association, and Demography. He has long-standing collaborations with researchers at a number of universities in China where he directs large-scale surveys and randomized trials. Prior to joining UNC, he worked as an Assistant Professor in the School of Economics at Renmin University of China.

Website: http://seansylvia.web.unc.edu/

Presented by, Jia Xiang, Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Economics, Pennsylvania State University

For many illnesses, patients seek advice from physicians, who signal the relative value of various treatment options. Patients then incorporate this information into their treatment decision, aware that it may reflect not just their own interests but the physicians’ as well. I characterize this interaction formally using a Bayesian persuasion framework and test the model’s main implications, using health insurance claims data for a large district in China.

In 2009, China launched major health-care reform to provide all citizens with equal access to basic health care with reasonable quality and financial risk protection. The Government quadrupled its funding for health, expanded social insurance for all, and encouraged local governments to conduct pilots to reform their health delivery system. In 10 years, China has made substantial progress in improving equal access to care and enhancing financial protection, especially for people of lower socioeconomic status. However, gaps remain. Professor Winnie Yip was joined by a panel of speakers who commented on future prospects for China’s health care system and looked for lessons to be drawn for other countries aspiring to achieve universal health coverage.

Video recording of the event is available here: https://hsph.me/eminarct8livewebcastlink.

Up through the early 1970s, the “Barefoot Doctor” initiative in China brought primary care to rural China through a cadre of village health workers affectionately referred to as the “Barefoot Doctors.” Julie Zhu was one of them. She was sent to the countryside from Beijing after high school and worked under the most famous Barefoot Doctor in China, Lee Sun, who was praised by Mao and whose stories were in the official newspapers and school text books. In her talk, Julie discussed poverty, medical care, as well as her experiences living in the countryside under Mao, using her own photo archive. The audience had the opportunity to travel back in time and reflect on China’s primary care system from a historical perspective.

On March 12, 2019, China Health Partnership hosted Dr. Susan Greenhalgh, John King and Wilma Cannon Fairbank Research Professor of Chinese Society at Harvard University. Her work on Chinese science and policy has spanned more than three decades, with obesity being the focus for the last five years. Capstone articles from this body of work finally were published in the BMJ and the Journal of Public Health Policy on January 9, 2019.

On February 19, 2019, Wen Chen, Professor of Health Economics from Fudan University, visited the Harvard Chan School and spoke on: China’s Healthcare Reform: Does Restructuring Government Functions Matter? Click to read a summary of the presentation.

On December 6, 2018, William Hsiao, K.T. Li Research Professor of Economics, discussed key changes that have taken place in China since the health care reform in 2009.

Dr. Christiani directs the Environmental and Occupational Medicine and Epidemiology (EOMEO) Program, and the Harvard Education and Research Center for Occupational Health and Safety in the Department of Environmental Health at the Harvard School of Public Health.
He is Professor of Medicine at the Harvard Medical School and Physician, Pulmonary and Critical Care Unit at MGH, where he directs the Molecular Epidemiology Research Group, and the Section on Occupational and Environmental Medicine. His research interests include occupational, environmental and molecular epidemiology. He has led several major research projects in the United States, including projects on molecular studies of lung cancer, esophageal, bladder, and skin cancers, pollutant-induced cancers, as well as acute lung injury and chronic obstructive lung disease. He is a leader in research on gene-environment interactions. In addition, he has developed extensive cooperative ties with industrializing countries in Asia, Africa, and Central America since the early of 1980s, and has led and conducted many studies on occupational health in these countries. Dr. Christiani is at the forefront developing and adapting of epidemiologic and laboratory techniques to the conditions to international studies. With regard to China work, Dr. Christiani was the first HSPH visiting scholar to the PRC, chosen in 1980 to work in residence and he has been involved in China projects for the past 37 years.

April 6, 2018 1:00-2:00pm, GHP Conference Room, Building 1, Room 1208
Dr. Yan Wang, Adjunct Professor at GWU, Senior Fellow at Peking University’s Center for New Structural Economics, and former Senior Economist at the World Bank, examines the roles of South-South cooperation, patient capital, and the prospect of development finance, as well as the risks and challenges associated with China’s development cooperation.

Professor Kleinman is professor of medical anthropology in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine and professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. He is the Esther and Sidney Rabb professor of anthropology in the Department of Anthropology in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), and was the Victor and William Fung director of Harvard University’s Asia Center 2008 – 2016. He is a member of the National Academy of Medicine and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Professor Kleinman is currently writing a popular book on caregiving for Penguin Press. He is also editing a book on the uses of medical anthropology. He is the author of articles in The Lancet and New England Journal of Medicine on caregiving as moral experience; global mental health; values in health; reforming medical education via the medical humanities; the search for wisdom; and on culture, bereavement and psychiatry. He has co-authored articles on stigma and mental illness; on the appropriate uses of culture in clinical practice; and on medical anthropology. His current projects include a comparative study of eldercare for dementia in six Asian settings; an ethnographic study of trust in the doctor-patient relationship in China; and a collaborative study of social technologies for aging in China.

Dr. David Mou is a third year psychiatry resident at Massachusetts General Hospital. He received a joint MBA/MD from Harvard Business School and Harvard Medical School in 2014. Currently, Dr. Hou is working on a mental health startup that is developing an App that predicts when mentally ill patients need help based on their smartphone usage patterns. Dr. Mou is interested in psychiatry, health care policy and medical ethics. He is involved in a project between MGH and Sichuan Provincial Hospital developing a 300-bed mental health facility.

Frank Hu is a Professor of Nutrition and Epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He is also a professor of Medicine at the Harvard Medical School. He became the Chair of the Department of Nutrition at the Harvard Chan School in January 2017. Dr. Hu is also the Director of the Epidemiology and Genetics Core of the Boston Obesity Nutrition Research Center and the Co-Director of the Program in Obesity Epidemiology and Prevention at Harvard Chan School. Dr. Hu was elected into the National Academy of Medicine in October 201

Dr. Jianhong Zhang, MD is the President of Yanchi County People’s Hospital in Ningxia Autonomous Region in China hosted a very engaging conversation at HSPH. Before this position, he was the director of several town medical centers in Ningxia, such as Huianpu, Wanglejing, and Huamachi. In 2017, he was awarded the honorary title of “One of the 100 Best County Hospital Presidents in China”. Dr. Zhang graduated with a medical degree from the Ningxia Medical College.

In Yanchi County, a health payment system reform helps establish a model of medical care that balances medical supply and demand, improves prevention, and provides convenient care to residents. The goal of the reform is to give rural residents access to medical care “in village for mild diseases, in town for common diseases, in county for major diseases, and only in out-of-county large hospitals for difficulty and disastrous conditions”. The new model has effectively resolved the problem of “unaffordable access to health care and high financial risk” for rural residents

CHINA HEALTH PARTNERSHIP Presents HEALTH POLICY AND ECONOMICS & RESEARCH IN CHINA: THE NEXT GENERATION
DATE: November 15, 2017

CRITICAL ISSUES CONFRONTING CHINA SEMINAR SERIES
Speaker: Winnie Yip, Harvard University
Dr. Winnie Yip is Professor of Global Health Policy and Economics in the Department of Global Health and Population at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and also Director of the school wide China Health Partnership. Dr. Yip was previously a Professor of Health Policy and Economics at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford, and Senior Research Fellow of Green Templeton College, Oxford, where she was director of the Global Health Policy Program.

THE FUTURE OF CHINA’S HEALTH DELIVERY SYSTEM
Dr. Winnie Yip is Professor of Global Health Policy and Economics in the Department of Global Health and Population at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and also Director of the school wide China Health Partnership.

AN ONLINE ECO-HEALTH SYSTEM IN CHINA.
Founded in 2010 as a platform to provide online registration and consultation services for patients, We Doctor opened the the first online hospital in Wuzhen, a small town in the southern province of Zhejiang in December 2015.
We Doctor connects doctors with patients across the nation through its mobile app and website. Patients can go through the entire process at home from online appointments, video consultations and diagnosis to e-prescriptions. They can also make e-payments and have the medicine delivered to their home. We Doctor connected more than 2,400 hospitals and over 280,000 doctors on its online platforms, and had more than 170 million registered users as of June 2017.

April 12 – April 13, 2017 | Harvard Center, 5/F, Shanghai IFC – HSBC Building. No. 8 Century Avenue, Pudong New Area, Shanghai 200120, China

In March of 2017, the Harvard Global Health Institute, in collaboration with Winnie Yip in the Department of Global Health and Population at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, held a two-day conference at the Harvard Shanghai Center that brought together leading scholars from Harvard and China to engage in defining a shared agenda for healthcare quality.

Dr. Linhong Wang, Director of China’s National Center for Chronic and Non-communicable Diseases
Discussion topic: Disease Control and Prevention(NCNCD), China CDC