Economic Evaluation: Priority Setting and Resource Allocation

Online workshop

*Background:
Healthcare systems around the world are faced with providing ‘value for money’ at a time of rising health care costs, increasing demand for care, and diminishing human resources. For health leaders who are continually striving to provide the highest possible quality of care for their patients, this environment of resource scarcity can present significant challenges. New innovations in practice or treatment may not necessarily be adopted by health systems since managers must balance the benefits and costs of all opportunities for investment. Indeed, these difficult resource allocation decisions must often take place within environments of rising demand for care and limited availability of resources (both financial and human).

Priority Setting and Resource Allocation:
To assist healthcare managers with these difficult decisions, the discipline of priority setting and resource allocation (PSRA) has emerged as guiding practice. Frameworks from ethics, political science, and economics have all drawn upon their respective disciplines to develop and operationalize frameworks to guide PSRA in a manner that adheres to the principles of procedural justice, deliberative engagement, and marginal value. Learning about these frameworks could support budget holders in structuring their protocols for resource allocation, and could help individuals submitting budget requests to optimize their submissions.

Lunch and Learn:
This lunch and learn will offer participants an introduction to PSRA, and an opportunity to explore principles and applications through a combination of didactic teaching, exercises, and discussion. It will begin by introducing the two main principles of health economics (scarcity and opportunity cost), and present the three frameworks for PSRA from ethics, political science, and economics. Participants will learn about the theory of multi criteria decision analysis (MCDA) that underlies these frameworks, and have the ability to apply the knowledge they gain within a group exercise.