Health economic evaluation for improving child health in low- and middle-income countries

Abstract

Health care systems require high quality economic evaluations to support wise allocation decisions to enhance child health within the population served. LMICs face the added jeopardy of having very limited resources (human and fiscal) to produce complex economic evaluations within highly constrained healthcare budgets that demand judicious expenditure. Furthermore, conducting economic evaluations in children is challenging methodologically and this is exacerbated in LMICs where healthcare funding and health priorities are influenced by external forces. World Health Organization initiatives such as generalized cost-effectiveness analysis have addressed many of the pertinent methodological issues. However, of 49 economic evaluations of preventive interventions for children published in 2012, only 17 were relevant to LMIC. Of 25 economic evaluations of active pediatric treatments, only four targeted an LMIC population. Greater collaboration between health researchers from LMICs and high-income countries promises, in future, to improve the quality of evidence available for decision-making.