Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME)

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THE GRANT

The goal of DCPN is to improve how health resources are allocated in low- and middle-income countries by producing estimates of the costs and cost-effectiveness of interventions and health service delivery platforms.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

Principal Investigators:

Dean Jamison, Christopher J.L. Murray

Disease Control Priorities Network

National and international decision-makers need valid, reliable, and comparable information on the costs and consequences of policy choices impacting population health. Although health-related data are increasingly available, significant challenges remain in the quality, methods, and collection of data used to set priorities in health.

The Disease Control Priorities Network (DCPN) project, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, aims to improve how health resources are allocated across a wide range of options, including interventions, health service delivery platforms (such as hospitals and clinics), and research and development of new health technologies.

DCPN researchers will:

• Produce estimates of the costs and cost-effectiveness of interventions and health service delivery platforms.
• Develop a framework for setting research and development priorities.
• Create a Disease Control Priorities Network to build connections and share information within a community of interested researchers and to determine the best ways to reach policymakers with results.

Through this work, the DCPN team hopes to improve the health of people in developing countries by fostering decision-making in global health supported by scientific evidence.

Collaborators

The DCPN work, funded by a seven-year grant, is led by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation with a network of diverse collaborators from the following institutions:

• Center for Global Health Research, University of Toronto (Canada)
• Fogarty International Center, US National Institutes of Health (United States)
• University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa)
• World Health Organization (Switzerland)

We anticipate the addition of new collaborating institutions and individuals as the project progresses.

Project Highlights

• Costing: In 2009, the Costing Work Group began the first phase of its work by visiting Ghana, Brazil, and Lebanon. Team members identified potential collaborators and data sources, assessed the structure of each country’s health system, and further developed the health service delivery platform typology. Research will focus on developing methods to measure and produce estimates on the total costs of delivering interventions and expanding health service delivery platforms. For detailed information, visit the Costing Work Group page
• Cost-Effectiveness: In 2009, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation hosted a consultation on cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA). This was the first of two meetings to aid the DCPN team in developing new protocols and guidelines to conduct cost-effectiveness studies. In addition to this work, researchers have begun identifying health care interventions for cost-effectiveness analysis. The aim is to produce CEA estimates for approximately 300 interventions and to measure the impact of changes in intervention coverage and health care financing on subpopulations. For more detail, visit the Cost-Effectiveness Work Group page

A History of Disease Control Priorities

The DCPN work stems from research carried out in the late 1990s by the World Bank. In 1993, Oxford University Press published the first edition of Disease Control Priorities in Developing Countries (DCP1), with contributions from the World Health Organization, scholars, practitioners, and public health specialists.

In April 2006, a second edition of Disease Control Priorities in Developing Countries (DCP2) was published, including updated information about the global burden of diseases linked to tobacco and alcohol use, psychiatric disorders, and injury. DCP2 highlighted cost-effective interventions based on careful analysis of health systems, the costs of disease burden, treatment, and prevention for a comprehensive range of diseases and conditions. These publications stimulated national and international debate on health-sector investments and have become reference works used extensively by policymakers, international development agencies, and academic institutions.

DCPN expands on the work of the previous DCP efforts by analyzing the cost-effectiveness of interventions in the 21 regions of the Global Burden of Disease Study 2010 as well as health service delivery platforms. The new work also will assess the effectiveness of different policy options on the content, deployment, and quality of platforms.

Copies of the publications, original tables, and information about the earlier work are available at http://www.dcp2.org/page/main/Home.html

For more information, please contact: dcpn@healthmetricsandevaluation.org

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