Preparing for AAR

Approved work plan

We finally got our work plan approved and are very excited to start our journey with AAR in Kenya! AAR is the largest and most successful private health care company in East Africa. It operates in Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda, providing preventative and curative health care to clients as well as recue and evacuation services. They have approached MIT Sloan so that we can help them address two critical areas:

• Codify knowledge via process documentation
• Evaluate potential services AAR can provide to the bottom of the pyramid, as well as share best practices of their for-profit model to other organizations in Kenya.

We can’t wait to get on the ground!

Getting ready

We are currently preparing ourselves while we are in Cambridge for our visit to Kenya. Our preparation includes several fronts: learning about Kenya and the healthcare industry, talking to experts about process documentation, researching documentation frameworks and getting in touch with local organizations. And of course, purchasing our tickets, which we already did, so we are getting closer to being ready for AAR and Kenya!

• Talking to experts: In the past few weeks, we have approached several experts who have been very helpful in sharing their insights and expertise in process documentation, medical processes and in recommending others who we should speak to.

o MIT Sloan Faculty: We have talked to professors in the Operations department to get their insights about process documentation. We have also approached the Organizational Processes faculty to make sure we have the right strategy when approaching the AAR staff. We want the staff to talk with us as freely as possible, so it is important for us to have a clear strategy. Finally, we have also gotten to know professors that are experts in Kenya like professor Suri from the Economics department. We are starting our contact with her to get the lay of the land on Kenya.

o MIT Medical: Has been a great source of information since they perform a similar role as AAR. The Human Resources director, Winnie Dansby, has been extremely helpful and has shared with us two manuals on MIT Medical’s processes that will be very helpful as we come up with our own framework for the manuals.

o MIT extended faculty: We attended the recitation on “Networking and Connecting with domain and country experts” and met Jose F. Gomez-Marquez, the program director of Innovations in International Health. He has been very helpful in putting us in touch with colleagues in Nicaragua and Pakistan who are working in successful health-delivery models.

o AAR team: We have also spoken with Steve Mania from AAR who has worked with the bottom of the pyramid at AAR. He is helping us set-up meetings with organizations in Nairobi that we can visit and interview.

• Research: We have actively used the library resources at MIT Sloan (i.e. the librarians) to guide us through the different databases we have access to. Thanks to them we already have useful information that will help us create the framework for the manuals:

o Insurance procedures manuals

o Claims handling best practices

• Last year’s team: We reached out to last year’s G-Lab team who has been very helpful in sharing their positive experience with AAR with us. Their insights have been great and have shared tips for our trip and our project. We will definitely continue to be in touch with them as our project progresses.

Overall, we feel we are on track. Our workplan is approved, after some minor roadblocks, our research is moving along and we feel more familiar with our project. We are getting ready to submit our Interim Report which will be very useful for our final deliverable.

We have 2 more weeks of school to go to finalize our ground work and get ready for the real thing…. We’ll keep you posted. The next post will be closer to our departure for Nairobi.