Healthcare Lab (H-Lab)

For more than a decade, healthcare spending in the U.S. has been rising at a rate far exceeding inflation. Annual spending is estimated to be $2.9 trillion, or more than 17.9% of the national GDP, far exceeding that of any other developed country. The overspending has not led to superior outcomes, and in fact the U.S. lags behind most other developed countries in providing appropriate access to care as well as in many other leading quality indicators.

Healthcare Lab (H-Lab) student teams work on complex problems with host organizations in critical areas, including operations management, analytics, IT, delivery innovation, strategic marketing, organizational dynamics, etc., with an emphasis on healthcare delivery.

H-Lab teams are generally composed of four MIT graduate students from Sloan and other MIT schools. Teams work for their host organizations on a four-month project engagement; they work locally or remotely from MIT for three months during the fall, and full-time, on site, at their host organizations for one week in October (SIP) or up to three weeks in January. The organizations collaborate with their student teams to define the project scope, develop work plans, and determine the deliverables the teams will create.

H-Lab teams deliver significant, concrete value to their host organizations. Equally important are the unprecedented opportunities for students to apply their leading-edge classroom learning to complex health and healthcare issues in real time.

The mission statement is to bring together members of the MIT community and Boston area who are actively working on global health or have a strong interest in cost-effective healthcare; expose them to the challenging aspects of low-cost medical innovation by experts on the field, focusing on health, policy, basic science, engineering and scale; showcase their global health research; and engage them in dialogue about the ways that MIT can become a hub for global health advancement.