How a health system is financed has a big impact on how people access health services, how much they pay for their care, which services are provided, and how well they are provided. Through our state-of-the-art research and economic analyses, training, and technical assistance, we help ministries of health and finance, donor agencies, universities and other organizations think through their health sector financing needs, where their spending will have the greatest impact, and how to raise the needed resources.

By fostering access to economic and health information tools, we advance the use of evidence to help ensure local health systems, policies, and interventions are appropriately financed to achieve large and lasting health gains.

As countries take the lead in financing their health systems, donors will have new roles and responsibilities to respond to emerging global health challenges. In this era of changing health aid, we work with donors and development agencies to generate evidence on emerging health investment priorities, convene experts to create new financing and economic paradigms, and provide technical assistance to implement these new models.

Initiatives

Consortium to Assess Prevention Economics

The Consortium to Assess Prevention Economics, a multi-million dollar cooperative agreement, aims to improve policy-relevant economic modeling of disease prevention in five areas: HIV, hepatitis, sexually transmitted infections (STI), tuberculosis (TB), and school health.

The Economic Benefits of Investing in Health

Ahead of the 2016 World Innovation Summit for Health, The Evidence to Policy Initiative produced a new report, Investing in Health: The Economic Case, which presented evidence on the economic benefits of investing in health. This report synthesized the best evidence on the economic value of health investments and identified practical and policy implications for national governments and donor agencies.

Global Health Economics Consortium

The Global Health Economics Consortium brings together UCSF health economists and colleagues at UC Berkeley and Stanford to support the capacity of national and local jurisdictions to design and deliver efficient, high-quality preventive and treatment health services. 

Health Financing for Malaria

The Malaria Elimination Initiative generates new evidence on economics and financing by: researching the costs and benefits of elimination, developing national and regional investment cases for elimination, monitoring financing flows to eliminating countries, analyzing the impact of policy and financing decisions on eliminating countries, researching the cost-effectiveness of malaria elimination interventions, and assessing and recommending possible programmatic cost-efficiencies. 

Intermediary Purchasing Platforms for Public-Private Health Sector Engagement

Our Evidence to Policy Initiative examines private sector organizations helping to achieve public health goals across different low- and middle-income countries to understand their structure, financing and impact.

International Collective Action in Global Health

This project aims to quantify and close the financing gap for critical yet underfunded global functions of health aid, such as pandemic preparedness and product development for poverty-related and neglected diseases.

The Lancet Commission on Investing in Health

The Commission, an independent group of 25 leading economists and global health experts, put forward an ambitious health policy agenda to achieve dramatic improvements in global health by 2035 in their report, Global Health 2035. The Evidence to Policy Initiative, which serves as the Commission Secretariat at IGHS, advances these analyses to help inform policy decisions.

Public-Private Partnerships

Since 2012, our Global Health Group has partnered with PwC Global Healthcare to form a joint fellowship to advance the study of public-private partnerships (PPPs) in health around the world. The goal of the fellowship program is to further the academic study, documentation and rigorous evaluation of PPPs, in order to increase understanding of their design, impact, costs and challenges.