HOME /

Case Library

Using our case library

Access to cases

Many of our cases are available in the T.H. Chan School case collection offered by Harvard Business Publishing. Others are free to download.

Harvard Chan School faculty and instructors can obtain copies of cases for student use, free of charge, by contacting Allison Bodznick, Curriculum Center Manager.

Access to teaching notes

A teaching note is an integral part of any teaching case, providing an overview of the case and the issues to be discussed as well as a roadmap of how to spend class time.

Access to teaching notes is limited to faculty only. Harvard Business Publishing offers teaching notes only to faculty and instructors who register as educators on their site. Harvard faculty and instructors can download some teaching notes on this site with a HarvardKey login.

Using the Harvard Business Publishing site

Faculty can register for educator access on HBP, where many of our cases are available. With an educator account you receive access to teaching notes, full-text educator copies of cases, articles, simulations, course planning tools, and discounted pricing for your students.

Looking for a “B” or “C” case? Click on “Related Case,” circled below:
related case

Browse our case library

Rossano, P. & Johnson, P., 2015. Adrienne Germain: A Leader in Women's Health Rights, Harvard University: Global Health Education and Learning Incubator. Access onlineAbstract
This case explores strategies for changing policy and attitudes at national and international levels through the lens of women’s health. Adrienne Germain: A Leader in Women’s Health Rights charts the career of Adrienne Germain, a leader in the field of women’s sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR). Germain successfully broadened and shifted the area of reproductive health to encompass SRHR. While the context of this case is women’s health, Germain’s strategies and choices would also interest those focused on generating lasting social change. The lessons students could learn from the use of this case in classroom discussion easily extend beyond women’s health to areas of social change, political advocacy, and the importance of judicious negotiation in health policy efforts. 
Quelch, J.A. & Rodriguez, M., 2014. Royal Caribbean Cruises, Ltd.: Safety, Environment and Health, Harvard Business Publishing. Available from Harvard Business PublishingAbstract
In January 2014, Gary Bald, senior vice president of Safety, Environment and Health at Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines (RCL), prepared for a review meeting with the company's chief executive, Adam Goldstein, and chairman, Richard Fain. Prior to joining RCL in 2006, Bald had spent 28 years with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. After seven years of upgrading security for the cruise line, Bald stated, "We've come a long way, but what keeps me up at night is what I don't know." As he prepared for his meeting with Fain and Goldstein, Bald considered whether his department's current initiatives would be sufficient to maintain RCL's position at the cutting edge of cruise industry best practice, and whether RCL could and should differentiate itself in marketing from its competitors in the areas of safety, environment and health.
Madden, S.L. & Siegrist, R., 2016. Management Control Challenges at Hadassah University Hospital—Mt. Scopus, Harvard Business Publishing: Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health case collection. Available from Harvard Business PublishingAbstract
Dr. Osnat Levtzion-Korach was the newly appointed Director of the Hadassah University Hospital-Mt. Scopus, a 350-bed academic community hospital located in the crowded, ethnically mixed neighborhood of northeastern Jerusalem. Mt. Scopus was one of two hospitals in the Hadassah Medical Organization; the larger 850-bed hospital, Ein Kerem, was located about 30 minutes away across Jerusalem. In the past, the two Hadassah hospitals had been centrally managed with the two on-site directors acting primarily as COOs. A new Director General of the system now wanted to de-centralize responsibilities, and Osnat, the first female head of a Hadassah hospital, had been promised much greater control over the finances and management of the hospital than her predecessor had enjoyed. The staff at Mt. Scopus pinned a great deal of hope on their new director to bring resources and a renewed sense of vision to the hospital, but Osnat knew her ability to do this depended in large part on her ability to manage costs as well as change a culture that had always prided itself on providing the best care but had not been held accountable for monitoring expenses or budgets.
Quelch, J.A., et al., 2013. Demarketing Soda in New York City, Harvard Business Publishing. Available from Harvard Business PublishingAbstract

In 2013, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg tried and failed to institute a ban on serving sizes of large sugary beverages. Obesity posed a large public health risk to the city. Mayor Bloomberg's proposed ban was one of many attempts to combat the rising threat of obesity. The case discusses the efficacy of the proposed ban on large soda serving sizes in the context of the other anti-obesity initiatives crafted by Bloomberg's administration.

Singer, S., 2013. Surgical Safety Simulation Exercise, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.Abstract
In this simulation exercise, students are given the opportunity to think critically about the role of motivation and organizational context in implementing a process innovation. Students work in teams of four to six people to develop recommendations for a hospital president on the best ways to implement a surgical safety checklist.
Simulation available upon request from author.
Sirali, Y. & Bhabha, J., 2016. Turkey’s Child Protection Crisis and the Mother Child Education Foundation (Anne Çocuk Eğitim Vakfı—AÇEV), Parts A & B, Harvard Business Publishing: Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health case collection. Available from Harvard Business PublishingAbstract
While violence against children in Turkey was widespread, people across the country were shocked by the news of seven atrocious child molestation cases,one after another over the course of a week in April 2010. Ayşen Özyeğin, Founder and President of the Mother Child Education Foundation (in Turkish, Anne Çocuk Eğitim Vakfı—AÇEV), a nonprofit organization devoted to supporting disadvantaged children and their families and promoting early childhood education, called a Board meeting to discuss whether the organization should assume a role in addressing the child protection crisis. ACEV’s leaders prepared to present recommendations to their fellow Board Members and to consider decisions critical for both the agency’s future and for Turkey’s children. 
Kane, N.M., 2015. Alameda Health System, Harvard Business Publishing: Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health case collection. Available from Harvard Business PublishingAbstract

“Alameda Health System” (AHS) describes a county-owned safety net health system adapting to the implementation of the Affordable Care Act and an increasingly competitive health delivery environment. It takes the perspective of senior management, specifically the Chief Medical Officer for the system, who has been in his job for just over one year. The case begins in late 2014, when the CEO of 9 years announced that he was leaving AHS to become CEO of a Detroit health system. He was leaving behind a senior management team that had been in place for 1–2 years, and had turned over several times throughout his tenure. At the same time, the system was experiencing a financial downturn, brought on in part by the loss of many low-income, formerly county indigent patients who selected subsidized private health insurance plans on the new state health exchange that contracted primarily with AHS’s two largest competitors. AHS also had yet to integrate clinically or administratively with two community hospitals, both of which were in poor financial health, recently acquired as part of a strategy to diversify the AHS payer mix.

The system faced operating challenges common to many publicly-owned safety net hospitals, including: a unionized workforce; an independent, mission-driven medical staff that had grown weary of administrative turnover; a poorly functioning revenue collection system; unprofitable contracts with managed care plans; relatively few commercially insured patients or contracts; long wait times for care; lack of telephone and transportation access to providers; and a low-income population with multiple poorly managed chronic diseases, including mental illness and substance abuse, as well as a high rate of violent crime.  

The case requires that students understand key aspects of the ACA and can synthesize other relevant environmental and organizational trends in order to recommend and evaluate the actions that senior management should take.

McCoy, M., Namwase, A. & Finnegan, A., 2019. The Coalition to Stop Maternal Mortality: Uganda , Harvard University: Social Medicine Consortium. Download free of chargeAbstract

In 2011 in response to two high profile cases of maternal death during labor and delivery, Ugandan citizens mobilized to prevent maternal mortality by improving the delivery of healthcare services in public hospitals. The Coalition to Stop Maternal Mortality ignited a social movement by utilizing strategic advocacy to hold the Government of Uganda accountable to its constitutional provisions on health service delivery. This case examines the Coalition to Stop Maternal Mortality and its landmark legal initiative, Constitutional Petition No. 16 of 2011, that focused the nation’s attention on the state of health services in Uganda and initiated a nationwide conversation about the role of government in delivering the right to health for all Ugandans.  What tactics and strategies can effectively mobilize power to bring about legal and policy change?  Would these be enough to achieve the change that the Coalition sought?

Teaching note available for faculty/instructors.
Kane, N.M., 2017. Strategic Planning in Lesedi District, South Africa, Harvard Business Publishing: Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health case collection. Available from Harvard Business PublishingAbstract
Mr. Joseph Nkosi, the Manager of the Lesedi District Health Department, South Africa, was hopeful that he could bring increased resources and better health to the area. Lesedi District, one of about 50 districts in 9 provinces in South Africa, was a largely rural area saddled with high levels of poverty, poor infrastructure, and high mortality rates; medical needs were high but almost half of the positions in the health department were unfilled, and turnover among staff was high. In South Africa, there was a push to improve primary care and to decentralize management to local levels in order to respond to local needs more effectively, but the processes for planning, reporting and budgeting were extremely complex and did not seem to support that goal. Mr. Nkosi wondered what additional skills he needed in order to work the system, and was also thinking about how the system itself could be improved.
Chaumont, C. & Anyona, M., 2020. Caught in a Storm: The World Health Organization and the 2014 Ebola Outbreak, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Harvard Kennedy School. Access onlineAbstract
The case recounts the events of the 2014-2016 West Africa Ebola Outbreak, starting with the death of patient zero, a young Guinean boy named Emile Ouamouno in December 2013 and ending in August 2014 when the World Health Organization declared the outbreak a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC), an international legal tool aimed to draw additional attention and resources to particular health events which present a global risk. In doing so, the case particularly examines the role of the World Health Organization, a key actor in the epidemic, and provides further context into the strategy, finances, and organizational design of the organization. Additional information related to the Ebola Virus Disease (EVD), infectious disease epidemics, and the socioeconomic and political context of the three countries most affected by the outbreak (Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea) is also provided. The case study draws upon interviews with key experts involved in both the management of the epidemic and its aftermath, including Dr. Suerie Moon, Study Director of the Independent Panel on the Global Response to Ebola, Amb. Jimmy Kolker, then Assistant Secretary for Global Affairs in the United States Department of Health and Human Services, and Dr. Bruce Aylward, Special Representative of the Director-General for the Ebola Response from September 2014 to July 2016.

The case is accompanied by an epilogue which retraces events after the PHEIC was declared in August 2014, and provides several quotes from key stakeholders involved in the outbreak, providing further context into how the epidemic was eventually contained, and which lessons could be learned from it.
Quelch, J.A. & Rodriguez, M., 2014. Cancer Screening in Japan: Market Research and Segmentation, Harvard Business Publishing. Available from Harvard Business PublishingAbstract
Since founding CancerScan in 2008, Jun Fukuyoshi and Yoshiki Ishikawa had helped to improve cancer screening rates in Japan. Between 2005 and 2007, awareness of breast cancer in Japan rose from 55% to 70%, but the incidence of breast cancer screenings remained constant. Jun and Yoshiki applied marketing research techniques to increase the screening rate for breast cancer, a disease which killed over 12,000 Japanese women in 2011. Cancer screening initiatives accounted for 60% of the company's 2013 sales of $2.5 million.
Cohen, A.P. & Kane, N.M., 2014. Designing a Surgical Quality Improvement Project at Eastern State Medical Center, Harvard Business Publishing: Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health case collection. Available from Harvard Business PublishingAbstract

This case considers the challenges, benefits, and costs of hospital participation in a widely recognized surgical quality improvement benchmarking program. The American College of Surgeons National Surgical Quality Improvement Program (ACS NSQIP®) issues performance reports twice a year to participating hospitals, creating benchmarks based on data submitted by over 500 hospitals. NSQIP claims that participation reduces surgical complications.  

The protagonist, the Chief of General Surgery at a large academic medical center, faces skepticism about the value of the report on two fronts: from some surgeons on his staff and from a statistician he consults. Some of the hospital surgeons find the data difficult to interpret, and question their utility in focusing quality improvement interventions. The statistician has reservations about the validity of the statistical results as a basis for action. The chief must decide if and how the NSQIP report can be used to improve quality. In the coming era of value-based purchasing initiatives for hospitals, the chief also needs to be concerned about how payers might interpret this data as they develop payment systems that reflect available measures of surgical quality.  

  •  
  • 1 of 11
  • »
See all cases & resources