This Cluster has historically conducted fundamental research on core health systems questions, developing both theory and methods which are widely applied today.
The areas below incorporate our traditional strengths and include emerging areas to which the department and cluster is well positioned to contribute. These are:
1.) Analysis of health system change
- Political economy of reform
- Health care financing
- Cross-national comparison and benchmarking (incorporating context)
- Analytic and strategic support for implementation of reforms
- Modeling and scenario analysis of reform paths for prediction of future trends
- Study of universal health coverage and insurance expansion
- Modeling of financial protection and equity of access
- Assessment of decentralization processes
- Strategic issues of human resources policy reforms
- Sustainability of donor funded health programs
- Ethical analysis and priority setting in decision making
2.) Evaluation of large scale or scalable health system intervention
- Causal impact of health systems transformations and interventions on population health, economic, social and behavioral outcomes: experiments or quasi-experiments
- Adaptation of evaluation methods for complex innovations for causal inference and identification of causal mechanisms
- Evaluation of health systems innovations, such as the role of incentives in health care, new health worker cadres, patient group models, integration of health care, home based testing and diagnosis.
3.) Delivery of effective, efficient, responsive health services
- Assessment of people’s preferences and health system responsiveness
- Analysis of health system performance
- Impact of community health worker programs and task shifting on health systems effectiveness and efficiency
- Impact of quality improvement on health system effectiveness and efficiency
- Study of district health system organization to improve coverage/quality
- Role of private sector in health financing and delivery
- Routine collection of health care costing data
4.) Fragile health systems (connection with Humanitarian Cluster)
- Social capital in communities
- Health system resilience
- Health care delivery in post-conflict states
