Dr. Berman directs the International Health Systems Group (IHSG), a multidisciplinary research, training, and service program dedicated to improving the ability of health care systems in low and middle income countries to improve health and equity in a cost-effective and sustainable way. IHSG focuses on three main themes:

1. strengthening the information base for the design and evaluation of successful health sector reform policies;
2. improving health care financing, with a special focus on the development and use of national health accounts;
3. making health care services work better through development and application of innovations in provider payment, governance, organization, and regulation to both public and private sector providers.

Dr. Berman is Principal Investigator at Harvard for two global USAID-financed contracts:

• the Data for Decision Making Project, a cooperative agreement, and
  
• the Partnerships for Health Reform, a contract in which IHSG is a sub-contractor to Abt Associates.
  
  IHSG also manages a number of smaller projects in different countries and regions and some of Harvard's professional training programs health policy and management as applied to lower income countries. Dr. Berman has worked extensively on health system reform issues in a number of countries, including Egypt, India, Colombia, Indonesia, and Poland.

Dr. Berman's research activities:

• Analysis of the supply side of health care systems. Dr. Berman has led work to describe non-government health care provision in developing countries. There is currently very little data available on private health care provision in LDCs, including numbers, types of providers, cost and quality, and factors affecting the development of private health care. Recent studies described the private health sector in India, Egypt, Colombia, Thailand, Zambia, Poland, and Kenya. Recently, Dr. Berman developed a framework for analyzing the public and private sector organization of health care delivery. This has been applied in Egypt and Poland. Another recent study developed a model to improve strategic use of government resources to strengthen health care delivery, comparing the returns to upgrading public providers with those of better educating the population or financing private providers.
• Development and application of national health accounting (NHA) methods in developing countries. Dr. Berman originated the "Harvard method" for national health accounting in lower income countries and has led in the development of regional networks for NHA development in Latin America, the Middle East, and East and Southern Africa. "National Health Accounts v. 1.01" (Berman and Cooper, authors), a Windows-based software program to assist in training, data organization, and data analysis has been widely used. Version 2.0 will be released at the end of 1999. Dr. Berman is participating in international discussions leading to a common global methodology for NHA and practical guidelines for its application in lower income countries. A health finance projection model to apply NHA data to health finance reform strategies is being developed in collaboration with the Australian Health Insurance Commission.

Ph.D., 1984, Cornell University