CHDS faculty Stéphane Verguet was senior author on a paper by Boshen Jiao and colleagues that modeled optimization of health interventions to include in an essential benefits package. Published in Social Science & Medicine, the model weighed health gains, financial risk protection, and health equity within a fixed budget.
The researchers applied the model to a case study in Ethiopia, evaluating 20 interventions under five budget scenarios ranging from $10 million to $100 million. The analysis showed that the composition of the best package shifted with the budget and with the relative priority given to each objective. The number of Pareto-optimal packages, in which no objective can be improved without worsening another, peaked at more than 110 around $32.5 million and fell to roughly 25 at $100 million.
The authors described the framework as an evolving decision-support tool rather than a fixed prescriptive model, noting that optimization outputs should feed into deliberative policy processes rather than substitute for them.
Learn more: Read the full publication, Optimizing Health, Financial Risk Protection, and Equity in Health Benefits Package Design toward Universal Health Coverage
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