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Jessie Lu
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Five years after the landmark UN endorsement, countries around the world are now working to translate the lofty rhetoric of UHC into defined, tangible, equitable, and comprehensive health services for their populations. On December 12th, the world will officially mark the 5th annual Universal Health Coverage (UHC) Day—an opportunity to reflect on the global community’s role in supporting progress toward this important goals. In celebration of UHC day, the Center for Global Development is pleased to host a short program—Better Decisions, Better Health: Practical Experiences Supporting UHC from around the World—featuring practical experiences supporting UHC from Southeast Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and at the global level. A keynote address from Mark McClellan will precede remarks and presentations from the core partners of the International Decision Support Initiative (iDSI).
Whether it’s called strategic purchasing, evidence-informed commissioning, or value-based insurance, the quest to squeeze better value out of existing resources is global. But lack of clarity regarding global and national healthcare investment goals, coupled with low technical capacity in ministries of health and insurance funds and multiple competing interests for attracting healthcare dollars, all make proactive evidence-informed buying hard to achieve. The global health community ought to help Ghana and countries like it strengthen their national systems for allocating resources including when selecting, negotiating prices, and procuring medicines for their populations.
The Global Fund’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) released a new audit report on Wambo.org, its online procurement platform for drugs and other health commodities. The headline: despite high marks from its users, Wambo.org is not yet on track to deliver the projected savings. But more than the headline, a close read of the report narrative helps us understand why reality does not yet reflect the Global Fund’s optimistic assumptions—and, reading between the lines, suggests three important lessons for the Global Fund and other international funders
With aid budgets shrinking and even low-income countries increasingly faced with cofinancing requirements, this is the right time for global health funders such as the Global Fund and their donors to formally introduce Health Technology Assessment (HTA), both at the central operations level and at the national or regional level in recipient countries. In this CGD Note, we explain why introducing HTA is a good idea. Specifically, we outline six benefits that the application of HTA could bring to the Global Fund, the countries it supports, and the broader global health community.
In April this year, the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) published a report making the case for “Integrating Clinical Research into Epidemic Response.” As reflected in its title, the 250-page-plus-appendices report makes a strong evidence-informed argument for integrating health service delivery with clinical research conducted during epidemics. The goal is to produce critical information on the efficacy and safety of potential therapeutics and vaccines for tackling such epidemics after they occur, or, better still, for preventing them from happening. Earlier this week, the group reconvened at the Wellcome Trust to discuss “what next.” The need to focus on systematic support and funding for the data collection and research functions in outbreak-affected countries came out again as the top priority.
The Center for Global Development—with Results for Development—is pleased to host this year's Philip A. Musgrove Memorial Lecture, to be delivered by Ricardo Bitran. Philip A. Musgrove worked on a broad set of topics in health economics and policy in developing countries. In each, he made major contributions thanks to his keenly analytical mind and implacable logic, along with his dry sense of humor. Setting priorities in health was among Philip’s preferred subjects. While at the World Bank he worked on the World Development Report 1993: Investing in Health. A main and controversial prescription from the Report was that low- and middle-income countries could tackle a substantive part of their burden of disease by delivering a health benefits package of prioritized, cost-effective interventions.
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