Applying health economic analyses to infectious diseases in LMICs

Hugo is a health economics lecturer within the Department of Infectious Disease Epidemiology at Imperial College London. His research focuses on evaluating the cost and cost-effectiveness of public health interventions for infectious diseases in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). He was previously the lead health economist at the Oxford University Clinical Research Unit (OUCRU) based in Vietnam.

In this seminar, he will discuss some key challenges associated with evaluating the cost-effectiveness of large scale infectious disease interventions in LMICs. The key discussion areas include - 1) Transmission dynamics and epidemiology: Discussing the role of dynamic transmission models and the challenges associated with limited epidemiological data for NTDs. 2) The costs of preventive infectious diseases interventions: Discussing key drivers that influence the variation in the reported costs of mass drug administration and the role of economies of scale. 3) The variation in methods within economic evaluations within global health: Focusing on the variation in methodology associated with productivity cost calculations, the chosen perspective and DALYs calculations. 4) The increasing use of other metrics: Discussing the results of a recent scoping review we conducted on the usage and methods of return on investment analysis.