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Rob Baltussen

Publications and source records attributed to Rob Baltussen.

16 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2006

Priority setting of health interventions: the need for multi-criteria decision analysis.

Priority setting of health interventions is often ad-hoc and resources are not used to an optimal extent. Underlying problem is that multiple criteria play a role and decisions are complex. Interventions may be chosen to maximize general population health, to reduce health inequalities of disadvantaged or vulnerable groups, ad/or to respond to life-threatening situations, all with respect to practical and budgetary constraints. This is the type of problem that policy makers are typically bad at solving rationally, unaided. They tend to use heuristic or intuitive approaches to simplify complexity, and in the process, important information is ignored. Next, policy makers may select interventions for only political motives. This indicates the need for rational and transparent approaches to priority setting. Over the past decades, a number of approaches have been developed, including evidence-based medicine, burden of disease analyses, cost-effectiveness analyses, and equity analyses. However, these approaches concentrate on single criteria only, whereas in reality, policy makers need to make choices taking into account multiple criteria simultaneously. Moreover, they do not cover all criteria that are relevant to policy makers. Therefore, the development of a multi-criteria approach to priority setting is necessary, and this has indeed recently been identified as one of the most important issues in health system research. In other scientific disciplines, multi-criteria decision analysis is well developed, has gained widespread acceptance and is routinely used. This paper presents the main principles of multi-criteria decision analysis. There are only a very few applications to guide resource allocation decisions in health. We call for a shift away from present priority setting tools in health--that tend to focus on single criteria--towards transparent and systematic approaches that take into account all relevant criteria simultaneously.

Journal Article↗
PubMed2006

Towards a multi-criteria approach for priority setting: an application to Ghana.

BACKGROUND: Many criteria have been proposed to guide priority setting in health, but their relative importance has not yet been determined in a way that allows a rank ordering of interventions. METHODS: In an explorative study, a discrete choice experiment was carried out to determine the relative importance of different criteria in identifying priority interventions in Ghana. Thirty respondents chose between 12 pairs of scenarios that described interventions in terms of medical and non-medical criteria. Subsequently, a composite league table was constructed to rank order a set of interventions by mapping interventions on those criteria and considering the relative weights of different criteria. RESULTS: Interventions that are cost-effective, reduce poverty, target severe diseases, or target the young had a higher probability of being chosen than others. The composite league table showed that high priority interventions in Ghana are prevention of mother to child transmission in HIV/AIDS control, and treatment of pneumonia and diarrhoea in childhood. Low priority interventions are certain interventions to control blood pressure, tobacco and alcohol abuse. The composite league table lead to a different and more differentiated rank ordering of interventions compared to pure efficiency ratings. CONCLUSION: This explorative study has introduced a multi-criteria approach to priority setting. It has shown the feasibility of accounting for efficiency, equity and other societal concerns in prioritization decisions, and its potentially large impact on priority setting.

Age Factors↗
PubMed2006

Practical approach to lung health in Nepal: better prescribing and reduction of cost.

OBJECTIVES: To assess the impact of Practical Approach to Lung Health (PAL) guidelines on prescription behaviour and the total cost of prescription for patients with asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and pneumonia. METHODS: Pre- and post-intervention comparison in a cluster randomized trial of primary care facilities. Seven health posts and 33 subhealth posts in Nepal were stratified by type and randomized into intervention and control groups. Health workers from the intervention facilities received 5 days training on the adapted PAL guidelines and their use. To collect prescription details, we used carbon-copy prescription pads in both groups. To measure the impact of PAL guidelines we used the World Health Organization's rational use of drug indicators and drug cost indicators, in a multivariate regression analysis. RESULTS: The PAL guidelines led to fewer prescriptions of multiple drugs and to more prescriptions of generic and essential drugs. The guidelines also lowered average prescription cost and wastage by disease except for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease although not to a statistically significant degree. Similarly, the prescription of antibiotics and adherence to guidelines improved, albeit not statistically significant. CONCLUSION: There is evidence that the implementation of PAL guidelines promotes rational use of drugs for some respiratory diseases. The expected health effects of PAL guidelines should be compared with their implementation costs before continuing training on lung health, and strategies put in place to sustain the effects.

Adult↗
PubMed2006

Costs of patient management of visceral leishmaniasis in Muzaffarpur, Bihar, India.

OBJECTIVES: To identify and quantify the direct and indirect economic cost of treatment for visceral leishmaniasis (VL) with conventional Amphotericin B deoxycholate, currently the first-line treatment in Muzaffarpur. METHODS: Costs of patient management for VL were estimated from a societal and household perspective by means of a questionnaire designed for this study, interviews and financial reports. RESULTS: The total cost of care per episode of VL from the societal perspective was estimated at US$355, equivalent to 58% of annual household income. The largest cost category was medical costs (55%), followed by indirect costs (36%) and non-medical costs (9%). The cost from the household perspective was equivalent to US$217. The largest cost category was indirect costs (59%), followed by medical costs (27%) and non-medical costs (15%). Loss of income because of illness and hospitalization and expenses for drugs were the largest cost components. CONCLUSIONS: The economic costs related to VL are substantial, both to society and the patient. Public health authorities in Bihar should focus on policies that detect VL in the early stage and implement interventions that minimize the burden to households affected by VL.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2005

Priority setting of public spending in developing countries: do not try to do everything for everybody.

BACKGROUND: Public spending on health care in many developing countries falls short to provide a comprehensive set of essential health services, which indicates the need to target and prioritize resources. However, governments often attempt to provide free services to the whole population, and often spend resources on low-impact services. This results in an inequitable and inefficient use of resources. METHODS: This paper presents a rational approach to targeting and prioritization of public spending, with an application to Ghana. First, interventions were tested against the economic justification for public funding, to define to whom spending should be targeted. Second, resulting interventions were prioritized on the basis of medical and non-medical criteria. RESULTS: The step-wise approach led to a rank ordering of interventions with a specification whether public spending should be targeted at the whole population or the poor only. Disease control priorities are prevention of mother-to-child HIV/AIDS transmission and oral rehydration therapy to treat diarrhea in childhood, and public funding of these interventions is warranted for the whole population. Case-management of pneumonia in childhood is also a priority but public funding should be targeted at the poor only. Low priorities for public funding are certain interventions to control blood pressure, tobacco and alcohol abuse, be it for the whole population or the poor only. CONCLUSION: Governments should not try to provide everything for everybody. This may help health systems to move towards a more equitable and efficient use of resources.

Budgets↗
PubMed2005

Cost effectiveness analysis of strategies to combat HIV/AIDS in developing countries.

OBJECTIVE: To assess the costs and health effects of a range of interventions for preventing the spread of HIV and for treating people with HIV/AIDS in the context of the millennium development goal for combating HIV/AIDS. DESIGN: Cost effectiveness analysis based on an epidemiological model. SETTING: Analyses undertaken for two regions classified using the WHO epidemiological grouping-Afr-E, countries in sub-Saharan Africa with very high adult and high child mortality, and Sear-D, countries in South East Asia with high adult and high child mortality. DATA SOURCES: Biological and behavioural parameters from clinical and observational studies and population based surveys. Intervention effects and resource inputs based on published reports, expert opinion, and the WHO-CHOICE database. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Costs per disability adjusted life year (DALY) averted in 2000 international dollars (Int dollars). RESULTS: In both regions interventions focused on mass media, education and treatment of sexually transmitted infections for female sex workers, and treatment of sexually transmitted infections in the general population cost < Int150 dollars per DALY averted. Voluntary counselling and testing costs < Int350 dollars per DALY averted in both regions, while prevention of mother to child transmission costs < Int50 dollars per DALY averted in Afr-E but around Int850 dollars per DALY in Sear-D. School based education strategies and various antiretroviral treatment strategies cost between Int500 dollars and Int5000 dollars per DALY averted. CONCLUSIONS: Reducing HIV transmission could be done most efficiently through mass media campaigns, interventions for sex workers and treatment of sexually transmitted infections where resources are most scarce. However, prevention of mother to child transmission, voluntary counselling and testing, and school based education would yield further health gains at higher budget levels and would be regarded as cost effective or highly cost effective based on standard international benchmarks. Antiretroviral therapy is at least as cost effective in improving population health as some of these interventions.

Africa↗
PubMed2005

Cost effectiveness analysis of strategies for tuberculosis control in developing countries.

OBJECTIVE: To assess the costs and health effects of tuberculosis control interventions in Africa and South East Asia in the context of the millennium development goals. DESIGN: Cost effectiveness analysis based on an epidemiological model. SETTING: Analyses undertaken for two regions classified by WHO according to their epidemiological grouping-Afr-E, countries in sub-Saharan Africa with very high adult and high child mortality, and Sear-D, countries in South East Asia with high adult and high child mortality. DATA SOURCES: Published studies, costing databases, expert opinion. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Costs per disability adjusted life year (DALY) averted in 2000 international dollars (dollarsInt). RESULTS: Treatment of new cases of smear-positive tuberculosis in DOTS programmes cost dollarsInt6-8 per DALY averted in Afr-E and dollarsInt7 per DALY averted in Sear-D at coverage levels of 50-95%. In Afr-E, adding treatment of smear-negative and extra-pulmonary cases at a coverage level of 95% cost dollarsInt95 per DALY averted; the addition of DOTS-Plus treatment for multidrug resistant cases cost dollarsInt123. In Sear-D, these costs were dollarsInt52 and dollarsInt226, respectively. The full combination of interventions could reduce prevalence and mortality by over 50% in Sear-D between 1990 and 2010, and by almost 50% between 2000 and 2010 in Afr-E. CONCLUSIONS: DOTS treatment of new smear-positive cases is the first priority in tuberculosis control, including in countries with high HIV prevalence. DOTS treatment of smear-negative and extra-pulmonary cases and DOTS-Plus treatment of multidrug resistant cases are also highly cost effective. To achieve the millennium development goal for tuberculosis control, substantial extra investment is needed to increase case finding and implement interventions on a wider scale.

Africa↗
PubMed2005

Quality of care of modern health services as perceived by users and non-users in Burkina Faso.

OBJECTIVE: Only one-fifth of the population in rural Burkina Faso uses modern health services. This article aims to identify barriers to increased use, which may help decision makers to develop policies to remove them. DESIGN: This article compares perceived quality of care of 853 pairs of users and non-users of modern health services. Non-users were matched to users on age, sex, occupation of the head of the household and distance to health post. Questions were structured according to four dimensions of quality of care. SETTING: Nouna health care district, Burkina Faso. RESULTS: Both users and non-users were relatively favourable about health personnel practices and conduct (77% versus 70% of the maximum attainable score), and about health care delivery (77% versus 74%). They were less favourable about adequacy of resources and services (51% versus 46%), and financial and physical accessibility of care (57% versus 51%). Both groups were very negative regarding the availability of drugs (33% versus 27%). Users were more favourable than non-users overall (66% versus 61%), and especially regarding payment arrangements (51% versus 43%) and costs (50% versus 40%). Observed differences were generally significant. CONCLUSION: To remove barriers to increase utilization, policy makers may do good to target their attention to improve financial accessibility of modern health services and improve drugs availability. These factors seem most persistent in decisions of ill people to stay with home-based care and/or traditional medicine, or go to consult modern health services.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2005

Cost-effectiveness analysis for priority setting in health: penny-wise but pound-foolish.

Cost-effectiveness analysis has much conceptual attractiveness in priority setting but is not used to its full potential to assist policy-makers on making choices in health in developed or in developing countries. We call for a shift away from present economic evaluation activities-that tend to produce ad hoc and incomparable economic evaluation studies and, therefore, add little to the compendium of knowledge of cost-effectiveness of health interventions in general-toward a more systematic approach. Research efforts in economic evaluation should build on the foundations of cost-effectiveness research of the past decades to arrive at an informative methodology useful for national policy-makers. This strategy means that governments should steer sectoral cost-effectiveness analysis to obtain systematic and comprehensive information on the economic attractiveness of a set of new and current interventions, using a standardized methodology and capturing interactions between interventions. Without redirecting the focus of economic evaluation research, choosing in health care bears the risk to remain penny-wise but pound-foolish.

Biomedical Technology↗
PubMed2005

Cost valuation in resource-poor settings.

Methods of cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA) have largely been developed for application in Western country settings. Little attention has been paid to the methodological issues in cost valuation in resource-poor settings, where failing exchange rates and severe market distortions require further clarifications of appropriate valuation methods. This paper links insights from social cost-benefit analysis with the current CEA guidelines to develop a more apt approach to cost valuation in resource-poor settings.

Costs and Cost Analysis↗
PubMed2004

Accounting for the cost of scaling-up health interventions.

Recent studies such as the Commission on Macroeconomics and Health have highlighted the need for expanding the coverage of services for HIV/AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis, immunisations and other diseases. In order for policy makers to plan for these changes, they need to analyse the change in costs when interventions are 'scaled-up' to cover greater percentages of the population. Previous studies suggest that applying current unit costs to an entire population can misconstrue the true costs of an intervention. This study presents the methodology used in WHO-CHOICE's generalised cost effectiveness analysis, which includes non-linear cost functions for health centres, transportation and supervision costs, as well as the presence of fixed costs of establishing a health infrastructure. Results show changing marginal costs as predicted by economic theory.

Africa↗
PubMed2004

Iron fortification and iron supplementation are cost-effective interventions to reduce iron deficiency in four subregions of the world.

Iron deficiency is the most common and widespread nutritional disorder in the world, affecting millions of people in both nonindustrialized and industrialized countries. We estimated the costs, effects, and cost-effectiveness of iron supplementation and iron fortification interventions in 4 regions of the world. The effects on population health were arrived at by using a population model designed to estimate the lifelong impact of iron supplementation or iron fortification on individuals benefiting from such interventions. The population model took into consideration effectiveness, patient adherence, and geographic coverage. Costs were based on primary data collection and on a review of the literature. At 95% geographic coverage, iron supplementation has a larger impact on population health than iron fortification. Iron supplementation would avert <12,500 disability adjusted life years (DALY) annually in the European subregion, with very low rates of adult and child mortality, to almost 2.5 million DALYs in the African and Southeast Asian subregions, with high rates of adult and child mortality. On the other hand, fortification is less costly than supplementation and appears to be more cost effective than iron supplementation, regardless of the geographic coverage of fortification. We conclude that iron fortification is economically more attractive than iron supplementation. However, spending the extra resources to implement iron supplementation is still a cost-effective option. The results should be interpreted with caution, because evidence of intervention effectiveness predominantly relates to small-scale efficacy trials, which may not reflect the actual effect under expected conditions.

Anemia, Iron-Deficiency↗
PubMed2004

Cost-effectiveness analysis of cataract surgery: a global and regional analysis.

OBJECTIVE: To estimate the population health effects, costs and cost effectiveness of selected cataract surgery interventions in areas of the world with different epidemiological profiles. METHODS: Effectiveness estimates are based on a review of the literature taking into account factors such as operative failure, complications and patient non-compliance. A population model was applied to follow the lifelong impact on individuals having cataract surgery. Costing estimates are based on primary data collected in 14 epidemiological subregions by regional costing teams and on a literature review. Costings were estimated for different geographical coverage levels using non-linear cost functions. FINDINGS: Intra- and extra-capsular cataract surgeries are cost-effective ways to reduce the impact of cataract-blindness. Extra-capsular cataract surgery is more cost-effective than intra-capsular surgery in all regions considered. Providing extra-capsular cataract surgery to 95% of those who need it (95% coverage level) would avert over 3.5 million disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) per year globally. The cost-effectiveness ranges from 57 International dollars (1 dollar) per DALY in the WHO South-East Asia Region where there is high overall child and adult mortality to 1 dollar 2307 per DALY in the WHO Western Pacific Region where there is low overall child and adult mortality. CONCLUSION: Extra-capsular surgery for cataracts at a high level of coverage is the most cost-effective way of restoring sight in all epidemiological subregions considered. Analysts from countries within a region are encouraged to further contextualize the results based on their own country's specific parameters.

Cataract Extraction↗
PubMed2003

Programme costs in the economic evaluation of health interventions.

Estimating the costs of health interventions is important to policy-makers for a number of reasons including the fact that the results can be used as a component in the assessment and improvement of their health system performance. Costs can, for example, be used to assess if scarce resources are being used efficiently or whether there is scope to reallocate them in a way that would lead to improvements in population health. As part of its WHO-CHOICE project, WHO has been developing a database on the overall costs of health interventions in different parts of the world as an input to discussions about priority setting.Programme costs, defined as costs incurred at the administrative levels outside the point of delivery of health care to beneficiaries, may comprise an important component of total costs. Cost-effectiveness analysis has sometimes omitted them if the main focus has been on personal curative interventions or on the costs of making small changes within the existing administrative set-up. However, this is not appropriate for non-personal interventions where programme costs are likely to comprise a substantial proportion of total costs, or for sectoral analysis where questions of how best to reallocate all existing health resources, including administrative resources, are being considered.This paper presents a first effort to systematically estimate programme costs for many health interventions in different regions of the world. The approach includes the quantification of resource inputs, choice of resource prices, and accounts for different levels of population coverage. By using an ingredients approach, and making tools available on the World Wide Web, analysts can adapt the programme costs reported here to their local settings. We report results for a selected number of health interventions and show that programme costs vary considerably across interventions and across regions, and that they can contribute substantially to the overall costs of interventions.

Journal Article↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Costs and health effects of breast cancer interventions in epidemiologically different regions of Africa, North America, and Asia.

We estimated the costs and health effects of treating stage I, II, III, and IV breast cancer individually, of treating all stages, and of introducing an extensive cancer control program (treating all stages plus early stage diagnosis) in three epidemiologically different world regions--Africa, North America, and Asia. We developed a mathematical simulation model of breast cancer using the stage distribution and case fatality rates in the presence and absence of treatment as predictors of survival. Outcome measures were life-years adjusted for disability (DALYs), costs (in 2000 U.S. dollars) of treatment and follow-up, and cost-effectiveness ratios (CERs; in dollars per DALY averted). Sensitivity analyses were performed to determine the robustness of the results. Treating patients with stage I breast cancer resulted in 23.41, 12.25, and 19.25 DALYs averted per patient in Africa, North America, and Asia, respectively. The corresponding average CERs compared with no intervention were 78 U.S. dollars , 1,960 U.S. dollars, and 62 U.S. dollars per DALY averted. The number of DALYs averted per patient decreased with stage; the value was lowest for stage IV treatment (0.18-0.19), with average CERs of 4,986 U.S. dollars in Africa, 70,380 U.S. dollars in North America, and 3,510 U.S. dollars per DALY averted in Asia. An extensive breast cancer program resulted in 16.14, 12.91, and 12.58 DALYs averted per patient and average CERs of 75 U.S. dollars, 915 U.S. dollars, and 75 U.S. dollars per DALY averted. Outcomes were most sensitive to case fatality rates for untreated patients, but varying model assumptions did not change the conclusions. These findings suggest that treating stage I disease and introducing an extensive breast cancer program are the most cost-effective breast cancer interventions.

Africa↗