Teams
The University of Bergen (UiB) is a research university established in 1946 and located in Bergen, Norway. The Bergen Centre for Ethics and Priority Setting (BCEPS) is a research center at UiB that conducts interdisciplinary research, education, and consultation on priority setting and ethical challenges in health systems. BCEPS aims to provide policymakers and healthcare professionals with evidence-based guidance on how to allocate resources fairly and efficiently, and has received funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (Norad), the Trond Mohn Foundation, the Norwegian Research Council, and UiB itself.
The FairChoices team at BCEPS is led by Kjell Arne Johansson, a physician and professor of medical ethics and philosophy of science, and Øystein A. Haaland, a professor of statistics. Johansson and Haaland were the original creators of FairChoices, and now the BCEPS team collects and curates input data (e.g., cost, effectiveness, and baseline coverage of the interventions), develops methodology for priority setting in resource constrained settings, implements changes in design and functionality, and makes strategic decisions and generally coordinates the work of the other contributors.
David Watkins
The University of Washington (UW) is a premier public education and research institution in the United States. UW’s Department of Global Health, a joint effort of the School of Public Health and the School of Medicine, was established in 2007 through an endowment from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and complementary Washington State resources. It is the second largest department at UW in terms of funding for research and training programs and includes 27 centers, programs, and initiatives conducting interdisciplinary research and training. The department recently founded the Learning for Action in Policy Implementation and Health Systems (LAPIS) Initiative, which is co-led by BCEPS principal investigator David Watkins and serves as a research and education hub that brings together interest and expertise in health policy and health systems in an international context.
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The UW team, led by David Watkins, is assisting in development and implementation of the FairChoices tool by assisting with database design, programming, and evidence synthesis; developing new methods for disease and economic modeling; studying the use of cost-effectiveness evidence in health benefits package policy processes; and improving the tool's user interface and user experience using principles of human-centered design.
Gene Bukhman
The Center for Integration Science (CIS) in Global Health Equity is a joint initiative of the Division of Global Health Equity at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, the Program in Global Noncommunicable Disease and Social Change at Harvard Medical School, and the NCD Synergies project at Partners in Health. The mission of the CIS is to accelerate the just redistribution of resources in the interest of global health equity by identifying integrated units of operational effectiveness in health care delivery and scaling their implementation through collective action. The CIS serves as the co-secretariat for the 22-country NCDI Poverty Network that launched in 2020 to support implementation of the recommendations of the Lancet Commission on Reframing NCDs and Injuries for the Poorest Billion.
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The CIS team, led by Gene Bukhman, contributes to the FairChoices tool by modelling the costs of interventions using an a time-driven action-based costing (TDABC) approach, developing an integration optimization model, and supporting country engagement and contextualization.
Stéphane Verguet
Founded in 1913, the Harvard School of Public Health—now named the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health (HSPH)—developed out of the Harvard-MIT School for Health Officers, the nation’s first graduate training program in public health. Over the past century, HSPH’s faculty—frequently working in collaboration with others at Harvard and around the world—have made landmark contributions revolutionizing public health.
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Stéphane Verguet leads the HSPH research team that contributes to the FairChoices Tool. His team focuses on developing and incorporating metrics for quantifying the equity and financial protection impacts of interventions (e.g., extended cost-effectiveness analysis), optimizing the design of essential benefits packages, and assessing priority setting and health system decisions.
Collaborators
Launched in 2017, Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is a specialized technical institution of the African Union established to support public health initiatives of Member States and strengthen the capacity of their public health institutions to detect, prevent, control and respond quickly and effectively to disease threats. Africa CDC supports African Union Member States in providing coordinated and integrated solutions to the inadequacies in their public health infrastructure, human resource capacity, disease surveillance, laboratory diagnostics, and preparedness and response to health emergencies and disasters.
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FairChoices works with Africa CDC to...
Funders
The Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (Norad) is a Norwegian government agency under the Ministry of Foreign Affairs responsible for managing Norway's international development cooperation. Norad grants funding to organizations within civil society, research, higher education, and private sector development that work with partners in developing countries.
The Trond Mohn Foundation was established in 2004. The foundation donates funding to Norwegian research communities, providing them with an outstanding advantage for establishing long-term research arrangements and and building global expertise.