Resources Repository
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ArticlePublication 2017Making Fair Choices on the Path to UHC: Applying Principles to Difficult Cases
Progress toward universal health coverage (UHC) requires making difficult trade-offs. The World Health Organization (WHO) …
Progress toward universal health coverage (UHC) requires making difficult trade-offs. The World Health Organization (WHO) Consultative Group on Equity and UHC has endorsed the principles for making such decisions. These principles include maximizing population health, priority for the worse off, and shielding people from health-related financial risks. But how should one apply these principles in particular cases, and how should one adjudicate between them when their demands conflict? This article by some members of the…
Priority Setting/Ethics | Health Systems | Policy/Regulation | Culture/Society | Economics/Finance | Government/Law | Health/Medicine | Global -
ArticlePublication 2016Economic Evaluation: Bibliometric Analysis of Recent Literature
This bibliometric analysis focuses on recently published full economic evaluations of health interventions and reflects …
This bibliometric analysis focuses on recently published full economic evaluations of health interventions and reflects critically on the implications of the findings. The authors created a database drawing on 14 health, economic, and/or general literature databases for articles published between 1 January 2012 and 3 May 2014 and identified 2844 economic evaluations. They examined the distribution of publications between countries, regions, and health areas studied and compared the relative volume of research with disease burden.…
Priority Setting/Ethics | Health Systems | Benefit-Cost Analysis | Cost-Effectiveness Analysis | Economics/Finance | Health/Medicine | Science/Technology | Global -
ArticlePublication 2017Designing an Optimal HIV Programme for South Africa
This 2017 study compares the traditional and a novel method of comparing cost-effectiveness interventions in …
This 2017 study compares the traditional and a novel method of comparing cost-effectiveness interventions in the context of HIV in South Africa, using a modeling approach. The authors argue that the assumptions of a) independence of interventions, and b) linear scale-up effects do not hold because South Africa has a large domestically funded HIV program with highly saturated coverage levels. The authors therefore aim to better allocate resources for HIV interventions in South Africa when…
Priority Setting/Ethics | Health Systems | Mathematical Models | Cost-Effectiveness Analysis | Operations Research | Infectious Diseases | Economics/Finance | Health/Medicine | Sub-Saharan Africa -
ArticlePublication 2017Household Expenditures on Pneumonia and Diarrhoea Treatment
This article, published in BMJ Global Health, quantifies household out-of-pocket (OOP) expenditure for treatment of …
This article, published in BMJ Global Health, quantifies household out-of-pocket (OOP) expenditure for treatment of childhood pneumonia and diarrhoea and estimates its impact on poverty for different socioeconomic groups in Ethiopia. The study finds that wealthier and urban households have higher OOP payments, but poorer and rural households are more likely to be impoverished due to medical payments. The present circumstances call for revisiting the existing health financing strategy for high-priority services that place a…
Costing Methods | Health Systems | Infectious Diseases | Child/Nutrition | Health/Medicine | Sub-Saharan Africa -
ArticlePublication 2016Funding Gap for Immunization Across 94 Low- and Middle-Income Countries
This analysis estimates immunization program costs, potentially available financing, and resulting funding gap for 94 …
This analysis estimates immunization program costs, potentially available financing, and resulting funding gap for 94 low- and middle-income countries over the five-year period of 2016–2020. Vaccine financing by country governments, GAVI, and other development sources was forecasted for vaccine, supply chain, and service delivery based on an analysis of comprehensive multi-year plans together with a series of scenarios. The authors found that that delivery of full vaccination programs across the 94 countries would result in a total…
Costing Methods | Health Systems | Mathematical Models | Cost-Effectiveness Analysis | Infectious Diseases | Global Governance | Economics/Finance | Health/Medicine | Sub-Saharan Africa | Middle East & North Africa | Latin America & Caribbean | Asia & Pacific -
ArticlePublication 2016Reproductive, Maternal, Newborn, and Child Health: Key Messages from DCP3
As part of the Disease Control Priorities, Third Edition, the World Bank has published a …
As part of the Disease Control Priorities, Third Edition, the World Bank has published a volume on Reproductive, Maternal, Newborn and Child Health that identifies essential cost-effective health interventions that can be scaled-up now to reduce maternal, newborn and child deaths, and stillbirths. This article summarizes the key findings and estimates the impact and cost of expanded implementation of these interventions. Scaling up all preventive and therapeutic health interventions in these integrated packages from current…
Costing Methods | Health Systems | Cost-Effectiveness Analysis | Maternal/Reproductive Health | Child/Nutrition | Health/Medicine | Global -
ArticlePublication 2016Country-Level Cost-Effectiveness Thresholds
This article estimates the cost-effectiveness thresholds (CETs) for health interventions in several low and middle-income …
This article estimates the cost-effectiveness thresholds (CETs) for health interventions in several low and middle-income countries (LMICs), based on opportunity costs. When there are constraints on a health care system’s budget or ability to increase expenditures, additional costs imposed by interventions have an “opportunity cost” in terms of the health foregone because other interventions cannot be provided. The authors argue that cost-effectiveness thresholds should reflect health opportunity cost and aim to calculate these in four…
Priority Setting/Ethics | Health Systems | Cost-Effectiveness Analysis | Economics/Finance | Health/Medicine | Sub-Saharan Africa | Middle East & North Africa | Latin America & Caribbean | Europe | Asia & Pacific -
ArticlePublication 2016Cost-Effectiveness Thresholds: Pros and Cons
This WHO bulletin compares the two main methods for comparing the cost-effectiveness of health interventions. …
This WHO bulletin compares the two main methods for comparing the cost-effectiveness of health interventions. Cost-effectiveness thresholds allow health decision makers to identify cost-effectiveness ratios that represent good or bad value for money. In 2001, the World Health Organization's Commission on Macroeconomics in Health suggested cost-effectiveness thresholds based on multiples of a country's per-capita gross domestic product (GDP). In some contexts, these thresholds have been used as decision rules. However, this approach lacks country specificity…
Priority Setting/Ethics | Health Systems | Cost-Effectiveness Analysis | Health/Medicine -
ArticlePublication 2016Assessing Medical Impoverishment by Cause
This article, published in BMC Medicine, utilizes a cost and epidemiological model to propose an …
This article, published in BMC Medicine, utilizes a cost and epidemiological model to propose an assessment of the burden of medical impoverishment in Ethiopia (i.e., the number of households crossing a poverty line due to out-of-pocket (OOP) direct medical expenses). Among 20 leading causes of mortality, the authors estimate the burden of medical impoverishment to be around 350,000 poverty cases, with the top three causes of medical impoverishment attributed to diarrhea, lower respiratory infections, and…
Costing Methods | Health Systems | Health/Medicine | Sub-Saharan Africa