Public Health Economics

Prevention Impacts Simulation Model (PRISM)
Helps users make informed decisions about which chronic disease interventions to implement in their communities by simulating the likely impact of 35 chronic-disease prevention and management strategies (registration required)

Center for Health Care Strategies’ Return on Investment Calculator
Enables policy makers and program administrators from Medicaid, health plans, and healthcare organizations to evaluate the financial benefits of initiatives designed to improve healthcare quality and reduce costs

OSHA’s “Safety Pays” Program
Uses a company’s profit margin, the average costs of an occupational injury or illness, and an indirect cost multiplier to project the amount of sales a company would need to cover those costs and the potential effects on a company’s profitability

A Guide to the Fundamentals of Economic Evaluation in Public Health
An overview of the methods and tools that can help inform public health decisions based on economic principles but addressing health outcomes. Learn when to use economic evaluation methods, how to read an economic evaluation report, and what the approaches employed and the conclusions achieved are. (Ethical considerations are also discussed in the guide.)

Course: Using Big Data to Solve Economic and Social Problems
Lecture materials and videos for a course entitled “Using Big Data to Solve Economic and Social Problems.” This course provides an introduction to modern applied economics and does not require any prior background in economics or statistics. It is intended to complement traditional Principles of Economics (Econ 101) courses. Topics include equality of opportunity, education, health, the environment, and criminal justice. The course provides an introduction to basic statistical methods and data analysis techniques, including regression analysis, causal inference, quasi-experimental methods, and machine learning.

Economics of Injury and Violence Prevention
Resources to help you identify, measure, value, and compare the costs and consequences of injuries and prevention strategies. CDC’s National Center for Injury and Prevention Control applies health economics to the study of opioid overdoses, suicide, child abuse and neglect, intimate partner violence, older adult falls, traumatic brain injury, motor vehicle crashes, and other causes of injuries and violence.

POLARIS Economic Evaluation
CDC’s portal for navigating policy-related tools, trainings, and resources. Use POLARIS to identify, measure, value, and compare the costs and consequences of different public health interventions and the relationships between resources used and health outcomes achieved by the program or intervention.

Updated Guidance for Health Economic Studies Submitted to the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP)
Procedures that should be followed for economic analyses to be presented to ACIP or an ACIP work group, effective as of October 2019

RabiesEcon
A tool to estimate the epidemiologic burden of dog rabies and potential epidemiologic and economic impact of a dog rabies vaccination program. See how the Rabies Econ tool was used to assess dog rabies vaccination in East Africa.

Recommendations for Conduct, Methodological Practices, and Reporting of Cost-Effectiveness Analyses
Recommendations developed by the Second Panel on Cost-Effectiveness in Health and Medicine

A Review and Analysis of Economic Models of Prevention Benefits
Reviews a variety of approaches to estimating the health and economic impacts of preventive health services, prevention programs, and policy interventions, and considers their usefulness to public and private sector decision makers

HHS Guide to Analyzing the Cost-Effectiveness of Community Public Health Prevention Approaches
Provides practical advice to help program managers and evaluators understand, design, and perform cost-effectiveness evaluations of community public health prevention programs

US Department of Veterans Affairs Health Economics Research Center
Helps Veterans Affairs (VA) researchers assess the cost-effectiveness of medical care, evaluate the efficiency of VA programs and providers, and conduct high-quality health economics research

Economic Evaluation for State Asthma Programs [PDF-3.7MB]
Provides the basics of why and how to conduct economic evaluation to complement a state asthma program’s overall evaluation activities, including the considerations involved in planning and implementation.

Economic Evaluation of Public Health Laws and Their Enforcement [PDF-400KB]
Provides an overview of the tensions that exist when laws or regulations restrict activities harmful to health, with trade-offs required between the good of the whole community versus the good of an individual. For example, wearing a helmet substantially decreases a motorcyclist’s risk of death and the associated costs, yet legislation mandating helmets can be considered a restriction of freedom of choice.

Economic Impact Analysis Tool
Allows community programs to assess their own performance and use the data to leverage resources for their sustainability. Also translates project-specific impacts into community-wide effects, including any new health and community services provided, number of jobs created, wages earned, and overall impact on the economy.

Best Practices for Conducting Economic Evaluations in Health Care: A Systematic Review of Quality Assessment Tools
Describes the strengths and weaknesses of checklists that have been used to evaluate best practices for conducting and reporting on economic evaluations in healthcare. Identifies well-developed checklists for use by investigators, reviewers, and journal editors to ensure that economic evaluations and their systematic reviews will be informative and transparent.

Public Health Return on Investment Tool
Designed to help public health departments estimate the economic returns from investments made in strategies that enhance public health service delivery, including quality improvement interventions. To use the tool, you’ll need to create a free account; for detailed instructions, use the ROI Tool Instructional Guide.

Budget Impact Analysis—Principles of Good Practice
Describes updated guidance on methods for performing a Budget Impact Analysis. This report of the ISPOR 2012 Budget Impact Analysis Good Practice II Task Force was published in Value in Health in 2014.

Introductory Handbook for Undertaking Regulatory Impact Analysis [PDF–313KB]
Provides practical guidance on using regulatory impact analysis as a way of improving regulatory quality and, as a result, government effectiveness and efficiency.

National Research Council: Improving Health in the United States: The Role of Health Impact Assessment
Offers guidance to officials in the public and private sectors on conducting health impact assessments to evaluate public health consequences of proposed decisions, and suggests actions that could minimize adverse health impacts and optimize beneficial ones.

Minimum Elements and Practice Standards for Health Impact Assessment [PDF-1.2MB]
Translates the values underlying health impact assessments (HIAs), along with key lessons from HIA practice into specific “standards for practice” for each phase of the HIA process.

CommunityFlu 2.0
Simulates the spread of influenza through a model community and assesses the impact of a variety of potential interventions (e.g., vaccinations, school closings, wearing of facemasks, patient and household isolation/self-quarantine). Also provides estimates for the numbers of cases, hospitalizations, and deaths that might be seen among different age groups in a representative community. Allows users to estimate the economic impact, in terms of days of work lost, of an influenza epidemic/pandemic in a community, calculating the savings and costs associated with one or more interventions.

FluAid 2.0
Helps state- and local-level planners prepare for the next influenza pandemic by providing estimates of the potential impact specific to their locality, including deaths, hospitalizations, and outpatient visits due to pandemic influenza.

FluLabSurge 1.0
Helps laboratory directors estimate the demand for specimen testing during an influenza pandemic, and helps public health planners develop pandemic response plans. Estimates the daily number of specimens that may be delivered to a lab for testing and evaluates the testing capacity of a specific lab (e.g., how many samples can be tested per day or work shift) per pandemic transitional day found in each of the pandemic stages.

FluSurge 2.0
Estimates the surge in demand for hospital-based services during an influenza pandemic, such as the number of hospitalizations and deaths of a pandemic (whose length and virulence are determined by the user) and the number of people who would require hospitalization, ICU care, or ventilator support during a pandemic, given existing hospital capacity

FluWorkLoss 1.0
Estimates the number of days lost from work due to an influenza pandemic

HIV Economic Model: (HIVEcon)
Helps assess costs and benefits of the proposed rule change to remove HIV infection from US immigration screening [PDF-160KB], evaluating both the potential number of HIV-positive immigrants to the United States and the health system costs over time, given the change in regulation

Motor Vehicle Safety Cost Calculator: MV PICCS 3.0
Helps state decision makers prioritize and select from 12 effective motor vehicle injury prevention interventions

Cost of Injuries and Violence in the United States
Reviews the medical and loss-of-work costs of injuries and violence, including a link to the Cost of Injury Reports, which give cost of injury estimates for fatal or nonfatal injuries, classified by intent and mechanism, or by body region and nature of injury

The Use of Economics in Informing US Public Health Policy
Covers a broad range of issues and methodologic approaches to illustrate the many ways that economics has been used in public health

Mechanisms of Legal Effect: Perspectives from Economics [PDF–365KB]
Introduces the concepts used by economists in in studying how laws, regulations, and other policies can address market failures in order to improve public health.

Maxi-Vac 1.0 and Maxi-Vac Alternative
These tools assist with planning large-scale smallpox vaccination clinics with maximum patient flow-through. Users can select the number and type of professional resources available to operate a clinic (e.g., physicians, nurses), and the software will allocate those staff, optimizing clinic operations.

MedCon: Pre-Event
Estimates the baseline medical care requirements (i.e., the number of persons who would require medical care) of a displaced population following a disaster due to pre-existing medical conditions

National Health Security Preparedness Index
An annual measure of health security and emergency preparedness at the national, state, and community levels

SurvCost
Estimates the costs of Integrated Disease Surveillance and Response (IDSR) systems and the seven categories of resources: personnel, office operating items, transportation, laboratory materials and supplies, treatment and programmatic response items, media or public awareness campaigns, and capital items

Introduction to Prevention Effectiveness
CDC-developed course that reviews public health economic studies and evaluation methods, covering the definition of prevention effectiveness, key components of prevention effectiveness studies, basic economic evaluation methods, and sources of prevention effectiveness data

Five-Part Webcast on Economic Evaluation
Webcast from CDC’s Division for National Heart Disease and Stroke Prevention designed to help public health practitioners understand the value of economic evaluation and choose the appropriate economic analysis for their needs

Health Economics Information Resources: A Self-Study Course
Online course that gives an overview and discussion of important sources of health economics information, highlighting the characteristics of US healthcare financing and guiding users in the assessment of health economic evaluation studies

CDC Steven M. Teutsch Prevention Effectiveness Fellowship
A two-year, postdoctoral, applied training program that helps health policy decision-makers determine allocation and use of resources to maximize health impact