Economics By Design

19/02/2024

The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) provides an online visualisation tool that allows users to examine and compare the burden of disease by gender, age, year and location. A great resource!

https://www.healthdata.org/research-analysis/gbd

19/01/2024

We are often asked where to find reliable estimates of the unit costs of health and social care in the UK. One of the best resources is the Unit Costs of Health and Social Care Manual from the Personal Social Services Research Unit. The unit has been producing these data every year for nearly 20 years now. Follow the link below for more details.

https://www.pssru.ac.uk/unitcostsreport/

10/01/2024

There has been considerable debate about the economic impact of COVID-19 on mental health. Pan-European figures from YouGov suggest that the UK has been particularly badly affected. Almost two-thirds of the respondents reported COVID-19 as having had a negative impact on mental health. This compared with under half of the respondents in Germany.

Read more about this in our below article.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/impact-covid-19-mental-health-economics-by-design-9ww6e

There has been considerable debate about the economic impact of COVID-19 on mental health [1]. Pan-European figures from YouGov suggest that the UK has been particularly badly affected.

18/12/2023

In this economic lens our guest contributor Maria Stavridou discusses the use of health economics to set priorities for essential health benefits and the case for including the impact of access to health services on workforce participation and economic productivity.

The well-being of a country’s population significantly influences its economic growth and development.

Read more here:

https://www.economicsbydesign.com/health-economics-for-essential-health-benefits-impact-on-economic-productivity/

13/12/2023

In our latest economic lens, our guest contributor Maria Stavridou discusses the case for LMICs to consider the impact of access to health services on workforce participation and economic productivity when setting local priorities.

Identifying the most cost-effective interventions targeted to reducing the burden of disease in LMICs is thus vital for both health and sustainable economic growth so should workforce productivity also be considered as a factor?

Read more here: https://www.economicsbydesign.com/health-economics-for-essential-health-benefits-impact-on-economic-productivity/

Governments and health insurance providers use pooled funds to purchase essential health benefits for their citizens or insured populations.

08/12/2023

Check out the WHO's publications on risk pooling and health financing strategies here: https://www.who.int/activities/pooling

22/11/2023

For people living in England, health is increasingly strained and unequal. This great resource from The Health Foundation addresses the leading risk factors for ill health.

https://www.health.org.uk/risk-factors

16/11/2023

Five Steps to Build Value Into NHS Workforce Planning

In our view, NHS organisations at all levels need to build value into workforce planning. They can do this by:

Step 1: Building realistic workforce plans that show the gap between staff needed and staff we can afford – and having a robust conversation about bridging that gap at Executive level, rather than ignoring it and hoping it will address itself.

Step 2: Demonstrating the economic value of the health workforce to ensure that finance teams can clearly see that short-term cuts lead to short and long term increases in costs

Step 3: Investing in real, appreciative leadership from the front-line, down to central departments.

Step 4: Dual Transformation: Empowering staff to innovate to solve problems while the big redesigns are happening – because only with this will the gap be bridged.

Step 5: Defining the rules of working in an era of high activity, so that staff do not bear the brunt of decisions as to who will receive care.

Read more about Economic Workforce Planning in our recent economics lens.

Treating healthcare professionals as a cost and not an asset needs to be reversed for workforce planning and approaches in 2022.

13/11/2023

Economic Workforce Planning: Treating People as Assets, Not Costs

Pressures to cut costs are getting worse, yet it is more important than ever to reverse the trend of treating workforce as a cost and not an asset, when developing workforce plans and approaches.

Many organisations and systems that we work with see workforce as a cost. Requests to hire are scrutinised and blocked, vacancies are seen as a way of reducing overspends and capacity plans to recover backlogs are essentially just plans to “sweat the assets”.

To read more about Economic Workforce Planning, take a look at our latest economic lens, written by Colin Lewry.

https://www.economicsbydesign.com/economic-workforce-planning/

Treating healthcare professionals as a cost and not an asset needs to be reversed for workforce planning and approaches in 2022.

10/11/2023

The medical technology industry has seen massive growth over the past few decades. It is now a multi-billion dollar market, with numerous companies manufacturing and developing a large product portfolio that is transforming the medical technology sector.

Read more about medical technology here: https://www.economicsbydesign.com/medical-technology-med-tech-health-economic-value-explained/

09/11/2023

Child health hubs offer a wide range of significant benefits to the healthcare system. Notably, a service evaluation suggests that early versions of the Child health hubs successfully reduced outpatient visits by an impressive 39%, resulted in a 22% decline in accident and emergency cases, and a 17% decrease in admissions.

Read more about the integrated care for children here.
https://www.economicsbydesign.com/integrated-healthcare-for-children-the-child-health-hub/

07/11/2023

The Child Health Hub is designed to improve children's and young people's health through collaboration and engagement of patients, parents, citizens and hospital, community, and primary and public health professionals. It facilitates collaborative working between paediatric consultants and GPs to deliver comprehensive care for children in their local communities.

Read more about the integrated care for children here.
https://www.economicsbydesign.com/integrated-healthcare-for-children-the-child-health-hub/

02/11/2023

From early diagnosis of diseases to precision treatments, medical technologies can help identify and treat illnesses more accurately and quickly. This means that patients receive the best care possible in a timely manner, which has an overall positive impact on their quality of life.

Read more about medical technology here: https://www.economicsbydesign.com/medical-technology-med-tech-health-economic-value-explained/

31/10/2023

In this economic lens we provide an overview of Medical Technology and its value to health and care.

Artificial Intelligence is already being used to analyse medical images for more accurate diagnosis, and machine learning can be applied to healthcare data to identify patterns in diseases. Artificial Intelligence (AI) medical technologies being developed include:
• Natural language processing (NLP)
• Computer vision
• Automated image analysis
• Medical decision support systems

The projection of AI market size in healthcare is predicted to grow exponentially in the next decade.

Read more about medical technology here: https://www.economicsbydesign.com/medical-technology-med-tech-health-economic-value-explained/

19/10/2023

All pharmaceutical companies invest heavily in research and development relative to prescription sales. According to the UNESCO Institute of Statistics, the world spent the equivalent of US$2.47tn on research and development in 2022. Of this, US$238bn relates to pharmaceutical research and development, and this is expected to grow to US$285bn by 2028.

Read more about pharmaceutical value in our article here:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/pharmaceutical-value-explained-economics-by-design

17/10/2023

The European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations have published some valuable pharmaceutical industry figures for 2022. You can find them here:

https://www.efpia.eu/media/637143/the-pharmaceutical-industry-in-figures-2022.pdf

13/10/2023

Countries worldwide increasingly use Health Technology Assessment to assess the value of new treatments, particularly pharmaceuticals. The World Health Organisation is leading in building capacity for HTA and adopting consistent, systematic, multidisciplinary approaches. Health Technology Appraisal involves comparing the performance of a drug (or other treatment) with its alternatives. Performance issues will include an assessment of the effect of the drug on outcomes (the therapeutic effect), potential side effects or other impacts, how it impacts the quality of life, and how it is delivered. This will involve a review of the evidence from the clinical trials, etc, and other published research, and often will involve expert elicitation to interpret the results and appraise the evidence.

Read more about pharmaceutical value in our article here:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/pharmaceutical-value-explained-economics-by-design

09/10/2023

Evidence-informed integrated care pathways can mitigate these risks. Conditions that typically involve multiple episodes and components of care, involve many health professionals or a multidisciplinary care team across different levels of care, and require high levels of patient engagement in the care processes, are high-priority conditions for the development of integrated care pathways.

Rifat Atun et al (2010) developed a conceptual framework for this analysis shown in the figure below. This shows that the need for an integrated care pathway is determined by the complexity of the health problem, the range of interventions required, the design of the healthcare system, and the health system characteristics. The more complex the condition, the intervention and the health system design, the greater the need for integration for a defined group of patients.

Read more about the value of care pathways:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/value-care-pathways-economics-by-design