West Coast Ballroom
Yay or Nay? Picking Optimal Essential Health Benefits (307873)
*Katherine Lofgren, Harvard UniversityJoshua Salomon, Stanford University
Stéphane Verguet, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
David Watkins, University of Washington
Keywords: universal health coverage, health benefit design, constrained optimization, resource allocation
As countries across the income continuum design, implement, and update universal health coverage policies, complex tradeoffs are inevitable. Health systems strive to meet an often divergent set of objectives including efficiency, equity, and financial protection. Designing a health benefits package (HBP) that balances these tradeoffs requires thoughtful methodological approaches. Often, extended cost-effectiveness analysis is used to explicitly report stratified cost-effectiveness results by additional dimensions such as urban/rural status or socio-economic status. However, once results are disaggregated it can be difficult for policymakers to balance health and financial outcomes back to a single, cohesive set of funded health interventions. Here we demonstrate the usefulness of mathematical optimization as an analytic tool to design HBPs that formally and flexibly incorporates multiple objectives and constraints. Using a selection of interventions illustrative of the country-context of Ethiopia, we show that the optimal HBP differs when deaths averted or catastrophic health expenditures averted are considered in single or multi-objective constrained optimizations.