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Abstract

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.

Cost effectiveness of a government supported policy strategy to decrease sodium intake: global analysis across 183 nations

“…intervention costs Country specific resource needs and costs were derived using the WHO-CHOICE database, 16 which includes detailed component specific estimates of inputs (ingredients) required for each intervention stage for each country's government and the estimated unit price for each input in that country including for example costs of human resources, training, meetings, supplies, equipment, and mass media (see supplementary eMethods). To facilitate comparisons between countries, we converted all costs to international dollars (I$) (see supplementary eMethods), which account for each nation's currency as well as purchasing power parity.…”

Changes in costs and effects after the implementation of disease management programs in the Netherlands: variability and determinants

“…The implementation costs were costs that occurred after the provision of DMP interventions to patients had started and included the costs for managing the DMP, the costs of multidisciplinary team meetings, the costs associated with collecting quality of care indicators for audit and feedback, the costs of materials used for patient education, and the costs of keeping the ICT operating. The development and implementation costs were systematically collected using a template based on the CostIt instrument of the World Health Organisation (WHO) [14]. This template was completed during face-to-face interviews with DMPs managers.…”

Global health worker salary estimates: an econometric analysis of global earnings data

“…Health workforce wages were first estimated by WHO-CHOICE based on ILO data in 2000 [11]. A comparison of inflated data from the earlier analysis to the more recent ILO data shows some interesting trends in wages over time.…”

“…Cross country estimates on the cost of health interventions help in this respect both donor agencies such as Gavi and the Global Fund, and international organizations, such as the World Health Organization. Recognizing a need for publicly available information on the costs and cost-effectiveness for health interventions, the WHO-CHOICE programme has made available since 2000, a database of price estimates of various intervention inputs for use in the economic and financial analyses of health care interventions [11]. …”