Estimating health care costs at scale in low- and middle-income countries: Mathematical notations and frameworks for the application of cost functions.

Marc d'Elbée ORCID logo ; Fern Terris-Prestholt ORCID logo ; Andrew Briggs ORCID logo ; Ulla Kou Griffiths ; Joseph Larmarange ; Graham Francis Medley ORCID logo ; Gabriella Beatriz Gomez ; (2023) Estimating health care costs at scale in low- and middle-income countries: Mathematical notations and frameworks for the application of cost functions. Health economics, 32 (10). pp. 2216-2233. ISSN 1057-9230 DOI: 10.1002/hec.4722
Copy

Appropriate costing and economic modeling are major factors for the successful scale-up of health interventions. Various cost functions are currently being used to estimate costs of health interventions at scale in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) potentially resulting in disparate cost projections. The aim of this study is to gain understanding of current methods used and provide guidance to inform the use of cost functions that is fit for purpose. We reviewed seven databases covering the economic and global health literature to identify studies reporting a quantitative analysis of costs informing the projected scale-up of a health intervention in LMICs between 2003 and 2019. Of the 8725 articles identified, 40 met the inclusion criteria. We classified studies according to the type of cost functions applied-accounting or econometric-and described the intended use of cost projections. Based on these findings, we developed new mathematical notations and cost function frameworks for the analysis of healthcare costs at scale in LMICs setting. These notations estimate variable returns to scale in cost projection methods, which is currently ignored in most studies. The frameworks help to balance simplicity versus accuracy and increase the overall transparency in reporting of methods.


picture_as_pdf
dElbee-etal-2023-Estimating-health-care-costs-at.pdf
subject
Published Version
Available under Creative Commons: Attribution 4.0

View Download

Atom BibTeX OpenURL ContextObject in Span Multiline CSV OpenURL ContextObject Dublin Core Dublin Core MPEG-21 DIDL Data Cite XML EndNote HTML Citation JSON MARC (ASCII) MARC (ISO 2709) METS MODS RDF+N3 RDF+N-Triples RDF+XML RIOXX2 XML Reference Manager Refer Simple Metadata ASCII Citation EP3 XML
Export

Downloads