Supporting Health Technology Assessment

Donors, policymakers, and practitioners continuously make broad impact decisions about which type of patients receive what interventions, when, and at what cost. The Center for Global Development and the Pan American Health Organization are pleased to present Dr. Mirta Roses Periago, Director General of PAHO and Dr. Harvey Fineberg, President of the Institute of Medicine on October 23rd at a forum discussing the importance of improving priority-setting institutions worldwide. The event will feature the Center for Global Development’s new report, Priority-Setting in Health: Building Institutions for Smarter Public Spending and speak to PAHO’s recent Health Technology Assessment Resolution—which calls for strengthening the link between HTA and quality health care, and improving evidence based decision processes.

Reviewing UNITAID’s Raison d’Être

Launched in 2006, UNITAID has lived in the shadow of its older and bigger global-health siblings (the Global Fund, GAVI, and PEPFAR, to name a few). In light of UNITAID’s forthcoming evaluation report and its upcoming strategy for 2013 to 2015, the Center for Global Development has examined UNITAID’s role within the global-health financing architecture through a consultative background paper which can be accessed here. Victoria Fan and Rachel Silverman’s blog, Should UNITAID Rethink Its Raison d’Être?, which introduces the background paper has also been a platform for debate, with responses from UNITAID’s Kathleen Strong and Philippe Duneton and University of Michigan’s Prashant Yadav.

Image: UNITAID

The Aid Fungibility Question

Do countries receiving lots of aid for health shift their own funding away from health? The Lancet published a letter by David Roodman questioning an influential study that concluded that most or all foreign aid for health goes into non-health uses.  David Roodman’s blog discusses the technical reasons to disagree with this conclusion, in addition to the importance of data transparency. In a similar vein, the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene published a Letter to the Editor by Victoria Fan, Rachel Silverman and Amanda Glassman asking whether HIV/AIDS funding undermines health systems.

Image: Gates Foundation/ CC