Category: Papers & Publications

India has recently implemented several major health care reforms at national and state levels, yet the nation continues to face significant challenges in achieving better health system performance. These challenges are particularly daunting in India’s poorer states, like Odisha. The first step toward overcoming these challenges is to understand their root causes. Toward this end, the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health conducted a comprehensive study in Odisha based…

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Background Primary health care quality remains poor in many countries, despite its importance for universal health coverage. Evidence shows that better management of primary health care facilities improves service quality, and that facility managers’ autonomy and training levels can augment their management performance. In India, there is scant research in this area. Research questions include: 1) What is the effect of facility-level autonomy on management performance and is the effect…

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Why does out of pocket expenditure remain high in India? We assess variation in financial risk protection in Odisha, India. Our novel study is the first to investigate the in-depth role of the private sector—especially private chemist shops—in providing outpatient care and also contributing to financial hardship due to healthcare costs. Introduction India has high rates of catastrophic health expenditure (CHE): 16% of Indian households incur CHE. To understand why…

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Faculty member Dr. Sebastian Bauhoff published a piece recently in Economic and Political Weekly providing an insurance cascade as a framework to understand and assess bottlenecks in accessing public health insurance in India. An array of bottlenecks has ensured that the numerous health insurance schemes introduced over the years have failed to make any significant dent on the health sector. This article tries to assess these problems by using the…

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For many decades, the nation of Sri Lanka has been providing for the health of its citizens at a level that exceeds what most other countries with similar economic situations have attained. Among other indicators, Sri Lanka has assured relatively good access to medicines while controlling prices. Sri Lanka spends about 1.6% of GDP on health, with about one-quarter of the total health budget spent on medicines. Its achievements in…

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The India Health Systems Project team will present several areas of work at the upcoming 2021 Congress of the International Health Economics Association (iHEA), July 12-15, 2021. Organized Session on Odisha Health System Assessment Individual Session, related to Odisha Assessment Individual Session, other

Members of the India Health Systems Project team will present several areas of work at the upcoming AcademyHealth 2021 Annual Research Meeting, June 14-17, 2021. Related to Odisha Health System Assessment Other

Our team member Jan Cooper has new research to share. Abstract We propose a new method to design a short survey measure of a complex concept such as women’s agency. The approach combines mixed-methods data collection and machine learning. We select the best survey questions based on how strongly correlated they are with a “gold standard” measure of the concept derived from qualitative interviews. In our application, we measure agency…

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