Prince Mahidol Award Conference

This month Amanda Glassman discussed the use of health technology assessment in the design of health benefits plans and presented the preliminary recommendations of CGD’s working group on Priority-Setting Institutions for Health at the Prince Mahidol Award Conference, in Bangkok, Thailand. The conference, which focused on Universal Health Coverage, highlighted Thailand’s health insurance scheme -- which covers 75 percent of the population.  But many national insurance schemes and health plans are not as well equipped, as developing countries struggle to define what will be funded with public monies as health care costs expand and priorities multiply.  Amanda’s presentation on priority-setting can be accessed here.

QuODA for Health

This month Denizhan Duran and Amanda Glassman released An Index of the Quality of Official Development Assistance for Health (QuODAH). This index tracks donors’ progress from 2008 to 2009, compares health to overall aid, and calls on donors to make good on both aid and development effectiveness.  Why should we care about qualifying the quality of health aid? See Amanda’s blog here. And thank you to everyone that offered input during our consultation.

Global Health Initiative

As the Global Health Initiative moves into its third year, there is still uncertainly about the Initiative's structure, leadership and budget outlook.  CGD published two notes this month, offering advice on how the GHI should move forward as it approaches a crossroads. The first paper, Global Health Initiative 2.0: Effective Priority-Setting in a Time of Austerity by Amanda Glassman and Denizhan Duran, recommends a “re-boot” of the program while supporting continued investment in global health. A second note, GHI Mid-Term Review and a Way Forward by Nandini Ooman and Rachel Silverman, offers advice for how the Obama administration can clarify its intentions for GHI and communicate this to their stakeholders.  These papers -- and more -- are discussed in this recent blog by Connie Veillette.

Malaria Estimates

New estimates that double global malaria mortality figures are catching the attention of health advocates around the world. But how valid are these results? Victoria Fan dives into this question in her recent blog post -- breaking down the “recipes” and key differences between the IHME and WHO estimates. But extrapolating and modeling from sparse and poor quality data has a limited application -- country level capacity for data collection needs to be scaled up as well. More on the importance of cause of death data for estimating disease burden here.

Image: Gates Foundation, CC