The Asia Health Policy Program at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, in conjunction with The Next World Program, is soliciting papers for a workshop, “Inequality & Aging,” held at the University of Hohenheim from May 4-5, 2018. The workshop will result in a special issue of the Journal of the Economics of Ageing, and aims to address topics such as:

• Population dynamics and income distribution
• The evolution of inequality over time and with respect to age
• Health inequality in old age
• The effects of social security systems and pension schemes on inequality
• Policies to cope with demographic challenges and the challenges posed by inequality
• Family backgrounds and equality of opportunities
• Demographically induced poverty traps
• Effects of automation and the digital economy in ageing societies
• Flexible working time and careers, and their long-term implications
• The dynamics of inheritances, etc.

Researchers who seek to attend the workshop are invited to submit a full paper or at least a 1-page extended abstract directly to Klaus Prettner and Alfonso Sousa-Poza by Sept. 30, 2017.

Authors of accepted papers will be notified by the end of October and completed draft papers will be expected by Jan. 31, 2018. Economy airfare and accommodation will be provided to one author associated with each accepted paper. A selection of the presented papers will be published in the special issue; the best paper by an author below the age of 35 will receive an award and be made available online as a working paper.

Researchers who do not seek to attend the workshop are also invited to submit papers for the special issue. Those papers can be submitted directly online under “SI Inequality & Ageing” by May 31, 2018.

For complete details, please click on the link below to view the PDF.

Non-communicable diseases such as heart and respiratory disease, cancer, obesity and diabetes are now responsible for some two-thirds of premature deaths around the world. And most of those are in low- and middle-income countries.

The United Nations has estimated that on top of the social and psychological burdens of chronic disease, the cumulative loss to the global economy could reach $47 trillion by 2030 if things remain status quo.

“That was a big whopper of a number and got a lot of attention, and that was good because it raised awareness,” said Rachel Nugent, vice president for global non-communicable diseases (NDCs) at the research institute RTI International.

“It’s an issue that is driven by a lot of different factors, “ she said. “And understanding how the larger social and economic factors affect NDCs, at a policy level, very little progress has been made — there’s been very little collaboration.”

Nugent was addressing the fourth annual Global Health Economics Colloquium at University of California San Francisco, with health experts, policymakers, students and researchers from Stanford, Berkeley and UCSF who gather every year to take a deep dive into the economics of a global health issue. More than 200 experts from 10 universities and public health departments attended the conference.

The daylong gathering focused on recent developments in the economics of NDCs, looking at case studies from around the world, and new guidelines for cost-effectiveness analysis and the role of economics in reducing health inequality.

“The donors are not convinced that there are cost-effective things that we can do in these countries; a lot of them are very skeptical that this is affecting the poor,” said Nugent, a member of the World Health Organization’s expert advisory panel on the management of NCDs.

In India, for example, much of the population still defecates outdoors, contaminating water sources and agricultural products, which can lead to malnutrition and physical and cognitive disorders. Many donors would rather see funds go to building latrines as they can see tangible results; NDC prevention is a long-term slog.

“But I don’t think we should necessarily think of NDCs as either-or,” said Nugent.  “I think that integration of services and programming is very much at the forefront of what is the right way to go.”

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Cost-effectiveness Analyses

Nugent’s research has shown five cost-effective interventions would avert more than 5 million premature deaths from NCDs by 2030, or a reduction of 28.5 percent in projected mortality from chronic disease around the world. And the average benefit-cost ratio is 9:1, at a global cost of $8.5 billion a year.

The interventions are raising the price of tobacco products by 125 percent through taxation; providing aspirin to 75 percent of those suffering from acute myocardial infarction; reducing salt intake by 30 percent; reducing the prevalence of high blood pressure with low-cost hypertension medication; and providing preventive drug therapy to 70 percent of those at high risk of heart disease.

Gillian Sanders-Schmidler, a professor of medicine at Duke University Medical Center and former assistant professor of medicine at Stanford Health Policy’s Center for Primary Care and Outcomes Research, addressed the colloquium about recommendations of the Second Panel on Cost-Effectiveness in Health and Medicine.

“There is a continued emphasis on transparency and comparability across analyses,” said Sanders-Schmidler. “And of course the big changes are that we’re now asking for a second reference case and using an ‘impact inventory’ table to clarify the scope of the findings.”

The independent panel of non-government scientists and scholars, which also included Stanford Health Policy’s Douglas K. Owens, focused on new ways to deliver health care effectively, yet with a focus on efficiency, as health care spending in the United States has reached 18 percent of GDP, much greater than the global average of 10 percent.

The first panel that convened in 1996 recommended that all cost-effectiveness analyses of health interventions include a reference case that uses standard methodological practices to improve comparability and quality. The second panel, which published its findings in September, now recommends that in addition to the societal perspective recommended by the original panel, that CEAs include a second reference case that looks at the health-care sector impact of an intervention. Additional guidance was given on what to include in the societal perspective reference case.

The panel wrote in its JAMA “special communication” that these societal reference cases should include medical costs “borne by third-party payers and paid out-of-pocket by patients, time costs of patients in seeking and receiving care, time costs of informal (unpaid) caregivers, transportation costs, effects on future productivity and consumption, and other costs and effects outside the health-care sector.”

They found most countries, including the United States, give greater weight to clinical evidence in their cost-effectiveness analyses. The panel now recommends an “impact inventory” that helps analysts and end-users of cost effectiveness analyses look at the impact of interventions beyond the formal health-care sector.

“We’re trying to ask people to be explicit,” said Owens, director of the Center of Primary Care and Outcomes Research and Center for Health Policy at Stanford.

“We want them to look at how to value outcomes in a societal perspective, not just the health-care sector, to look at all these other sectors such as productivity consumption, criminal justice, education, housing and the environment,” he said.

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Case Studies

Several case studies presented at the colloquium indicated that policy changes, government intervention and social factors are key to preventing obesity and diabetes and other NCDs.

Kristine Madsen, an associate professor of public health at UC Berkeley who focuses on childhood obesity, spoke about the nation’s first “soda tax” on sugar-sweetened beverages, which was implemented in Berkeley in March 2015.

The city has seen a 21 percent decline in the drinking of soda and other sugary drinks in low-income neighborhoods after the city levied a penny-per-ounce tax on sodas and sugary drinks. At the same time, according to a study in the American Journal of Public Health, neighboring San Francisco — where a similar soda-tax measure was defeated — and Oakland saw a 4 percent increase in the purchase of sweetened beverages.

“This decline of 21 percent in Berkeley represents the largest public health impact in an intervention that I have ever seen,” said Madsen.

Sergio Bautista of the Mexico National Institute of Public Health and UC Berkeley, said that Mexico’s sugary drinks tax implemented in January 2014 is expected to lead to a 10 percent reduction in sugary drinks consumption and prevent an estimated 189,300 cases of diabetes in a country famed for its sugary bottled cola.

William Dow, a professor of health policy management at UC Berkeley, shared his research on Costa Rica, where on average people live longer than Americans, despite the several times higher income and 10 times higher health expenditures in the United States.

Costa Rican men have a life expectancy of 77 and the women typically live until age 82; in Americans the numbers are 76 and 81, respectively. Obesity is low among Costa Rican men and few of their women smoke. Lung cancer mortality in the United States is four times higher among men and six times higher among women.

“It’s remarkable in so many ways,” Dow said, noting that deaths in the Central American country are due predominantly to infectious disease. “Does Costa Rica have any unique effective programs to emulate, or is there something going on upstream driving those health outcomes?”

He believes Costa Rica’s national health insurance and excellent access to primary care for nearly all its people are key. Having this guaranteed lifetime access to health care also reduces the stress and depression that can so badly harm physical health.

“And I would argue that probably diet is one of the most important things going on here,” said Dow, noting their diets are healthy.

Costa Ricans eat mostly unprocessed foods such as rice and black beans, corn tortilla, yam and squash, with little meat and plenty of fresh fruit.

“They also have the highest remaining life expectancy at age 80 of any country in the world, he said. “What we have learned in Costa Rica would be helpful in many other countries.”

Improving health has been a focus of Indonesia as it strives to implement universal healthcare nationwide. Yet as the government tries to achieve that ambitious goal, it finds not unlike other developing countries that poorer patients are struggling to access care, due to a number of environmental and financial constraints.

A set of conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs—a system in which patients are incentivized to seek care upon the promise of a stipend—were introduced in 2007 as an approach to improve health among poor households in Java, Indonesia’s most populous island, and a few provinces outside of Java. The programs specifically sought to better maternal and child health outcomes.

Evaluating those pilot CCT programs is the focus of a newly published paper by former Asia Health Policy Program postdoctoral fellow Margaret Triyana: “Do Health Care Providers Respond to Demand-Side Incentives? Evidence from Indonesia,” an outcome of her research completed at Stanford’s Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center from 2013-14.

Triyana found that the CCT programs increased demand for healthcare providers, and consequently, prices for healthcare services. While the programs led more patients to show up for services, they also may have limited access for some patients who were unable to afford services following an eventual bump up in cost.

Triyana concludes that policymakers should forecast effects on supply and demand before implementing CCT programs in order to plan and adjust the quantity of healthcare providers as needed. Such an approach could keep prices steady and in turn allow a greater pool of patients to access care, she writes.

The paper appears in the November edition of American Economic Journal: Economic Policy.

Triyana, now a professor at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, shared in an earlier interview her research plans and initial findings. Read the Q&A here or tune in to a podcast from her research presentation here.

Stanford researchers have determined that more than 15 million children are living in high-mortality hotspots across 28 Sub-Saharan African countries, where death rates remain stubbornly high despite progress elsewhere within those countries.

The study, published online Oct. 25 in The Lancet Global Health, is the first to record and analyze local-level mortality variations across a large swath of Sub-Saharan Africa.

These hotspots may remain hidden even as many countries are on track to achieve one of the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals: reducing the mortality rate of children under 5 to 25 per 1,000 by 2030. National averages are typically used for tracking child mortality trends, allowing left-behind regions within countries to remain out of sight — until now.

The senior author of the study is Eran Bendavid, MD, MS, an assistant professor of medicine and core faculty member at Stanford Health Policy. The lead author is Marshall Burke, PhD, an assistant professor of Earth System Science and a fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute’s Center on Food Security and the Environment.

Decline in under-5 mortality rate

The authors note that the ongoing decline in under-5 mortality worldwide ranks among the most significant public and population health successes of the past 30 years. Deaths of children under the age of 5 years have fallen from nearly 13 million a year in 1990 to fewer than 6 million a year in 2015, even as the world’s under-5 population grew by nearly 100 million children, according to the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation.

“However, the amount of variability underlying this broad global progress is substantial,” the authors wrote.

“Mortality numbers are typically tracked at the national level, with the assumption that national differences between countries, such as government spending on health, are what determine progress against mortality,” Bendavid said. “The goal of our work was to understand whether national-level mortality statistics were hiding important variation at the more local level — and then to use this information to shed light on broader mortality trends.”

The authors used data from 82 U.S. Agency for International Development surveys in 28 Sub-Saharan African countries, including information on the location and timing of 3.24 million births and 393,685 deaths of children under 5, to develop high-resolution spatial maps of under-5 mortality from the 1980s through the 2000s.

Using this database, the authors found that local-level factors, such as climate and malaria exposure, were predictive of overall patterns, while national-level factors were relatively poor predictors of child mortality.

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Temperature, malaria exposure, civil conflict

“We didn’t see jumps in mortality at country borders, which is what you’d expect if national differences really determined mortality,” said co-author Sam Heft-Neal, PhD, a postdoctoral scholar in Earth System Science. “But we saw a strong relationship between local-level factors and mortality.”

For example, he said, one standard deviation increase in temperature above the local average was related to a 16-percent higher child mortality rate. Local malaria exposure and recent civil conflict were also predictive of mortality.

The authors found that 23 percent of the children in their study countries live in mortality hotspots — places where mortality rates are not declining fast enough to meet the targets of the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals. The majority of these live in just two countries: Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of Congo. In only three countries do fewer than 5 percent of children live in hotspots: Benin, Namibia and Tanzania.

As part of the research, the authors have established a high-resolution mortality database with local-level mortality data spanning the last three decades to provide “new opportunities for a deeper understanding of the role that environmental, economic, or political conditions play in shaping mortality outcomes.”  The database, available at http://fsedata.stanford.edu, is an open-source tool for health and environmental researchers, child-health experts and policymakers.

“Our hope is that the creation of a high-resolution mortality database will provide other researchers new opportunities for deeper understanding of the role that environmental, economic or political conditions play in shaping mortality outcomes,” said Bendavid.  “These data could also improve the targeting of aid to areas where it is most needed.”

The research was supported by a grant from the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. 

China’s recent initiatives to deepen health reform, control antimicrobial resistance, and strengthen primary health services are the topics of ongoing collaborative research by the Asia Health Policy Program (AHPP) at Stanford’s Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center and Chinese counterparts. For example, with generous support from ACON Biotechnology and in partnership with the ACON Biotech Primary Care Research Center in Hangzhou, China, AHPP hosts an annual conference on community health services and primary health care reform in China.

The conference, titled Forum on Community Health Services and Primary Health Care Reform, was held in June at the Stanford Center at Peking University (SCPKU) in Beijing. It featured distinguished policymakers, providers and researchers who discussed a wide-range of topics from China’s emerging “hierarchical medical system” for referring patients to the appropriate level of care (fenji zhenliao), as well as the practice and challenges of innovative approaches to primary care and integrated medical care systems. Yongquan Chen, director of Yong’an City Hospital and representative for the mayor’s office of Sanming, talked about health reforms in Sanming City, Fujian Province, a famous example within China. He discussed the incentives and reasoning behind the reforms, which focus on removing incentives for over-prescription of medications, demonstrating government leadership for comprehensive reforms, consolidating three agencies into one, monitoring implementation and easing tensions between doctors and patients. He pointed out the feasibility and early successes of reform by comparing public hospitals in the city in terms of their revenues and costs, reduced reliance on net revenue from medication sales, and other dimensions of performance. Finally, he addressed reform implementation and future plans on both the hospital's and the government's part.

Xiaofang Han, former director of the Beijing Municipal Development and Reform Commission, shared her personal views on the challenges patients face in navigating China’s health system (kan bing nan) and the need to improve the structure of the delivery system, including a revision to the incentives driving over-prescription in China’s fee-for-service payment system. She emphasized that patients’ distrust of primary care providers can only be overcome by demonstrating improved quality (e.g. with a systematic training program for general practitioners, GPs), and that referral systems should be based on the actual capabilities of the clinicians, not their formal labels. To reach China’s goal of over 80 percent of patients receiving management and first-contact care within their local communities will require improved training and incentive programs for newly-minted MDs, a more flexible physician labor market, and innovations in e-health and patient choice regarding gatekeeping or “contract physician services” (qianyue fuwu).        

Guangde County People's Hospital Director Mingliang Xu spoke about practices and exploration of healthcare alliances and initiatives to provide transparent incentives linking medical staff bonuses to metrics of quality. Ping Zhu from Community Healthcare Service Development and Research Center in Ningbo addressed building solid relationships between doctors and residents and providing more patient-centered services.        

Professor Yingyao Chen from Fudan University School of Public Health discussed performance assessment of community health service agencies based on his research in Shanghai. He introduced the strengths and weaknesses of the incentives embedded in the assessment system for China’s primary care providers, and concluded with suggestions for future research. Dr. Linlin Hu, associate professor at Peking Union Medical College, discussed China's progress and challenges of providing universal coverage of national essential public health services.

Professor Hufeng Wang of Renmin University of China discussed China’s vision for a “hierarchical medical system”– bearing resemblance to “integrated care,” “managed care,” or NHS-like coordination of primary and specialized care – with examples of pilot reforms from Xiamen, Zhenjiang and Dalian cities. Dr. Zuxun Lu, professor of Tongji Medical College of Huazhong University of Science and Technology, also discussed hierarchical medical systems and declared that China currently had a “discounted gatekeeper system.”

Dr. Yaping Du of Zhejiang University presented his research on mobile technology for management of lipid levels and with the help of a volunteer, demonstrated “Dyslipidemia Manager,” a mobile app-based product for both patients and doctors. Innovative strategies for primary prevention of cardiovascular diseases in low- and middle-income countries were the focus of remarks by Dr. Guanyang Zou from the Institute for Global Health and Development at Queen Margaret University, including its connections to international experiences with China’s current efforts in that area.  

In sum, the 2016 Forum elicited lively, evidence-based discussions about the opportunities and challenges in improving primary care and sustaining universal coverage for China.  Plans are underway for convening the third annual ACON Biotech-Stanford AHPP Forum on Community Health Services and Primary Health Care Reform in June 2017 at SCPKU. Anyone with original research or innovative experiences with primary care in China may contact Karen Eggleston regarding participation in next year’s Forum. 

An Indian businessman approached Stanford Medicine in 2005 with an outlandish proposition: Help us build an ambulance system across the sprawling South Asia nation, which is home to 10 percent of the world’s traffic deaths.

S.V. Mahadevan, MD, an associate professor of emergency medicine at Stanford Medicine, was skeptical the nonprofit GVK EMRI (Emergency Management and Research Institute) could truly pull it off.

They only had 14 ambulances in the world’s second most populous nation.

Today the system has expanded to a fleet of nearly 10,000 ambulances, manned by some 20,000 medical professionals who ply the roads in cities and rural villages to provide access to emergency care to 750 million people — three-quarters of India’s population — according to a story in Stanford Medicine magazine last year.

“It’s hard to fathom what this system has done in 10 years,” said Mahadevan, founder of Stanford Emergency Medicine International, which has provided medical expertise to GVK EMRI over the last decade, helping to train the EMTs who now belong to the largest ambulance service in the developing world.

“It could be regarded as one of the most important advances in global medicine in the world today," he said.

Yet up until now there has been no analytical research on the impact of the ambulance service. Though EMRI says its 911-like service has saved more than 1.4 million lives in its first decade, there has been no published research to back up that claim.

Now, research by Stanford Health Policy scholars published in the October edition of the health policy journal, Health Affairs, indicates EMRI’s system has had a significant impact on saving the lives of newborns and infants, one of the most challenging health dilemmas plaguing India today.

Focusing on the first two states served by GVK EMRI — with a combined population of 145 million — their results show that the organization’s services have reduced infant and neonatal mortality rates by at least 2 percent in high-mortality areas of the western state of Gujarat. There were similar effects statewide in the southeastern state of Andhra Pradesh.

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“With our modern medical knowledge, childbirth should not be so risky and newborns should not be dying at such high rates,” said Babiarz.

India has 28 maternal neonatal or infant deaths per 1,000 live births, according to the World Bank, making it one of the highest in the world. The global average is 19.2 deaths per 1,000 births; the rate drops to 4 in North America.

“These issues are particularly compelling to me as a mother,” Babiarz said. “It's wonderful to find a model that has found some success in connecting mothers and their infants with high-quality and timely emergency care when it is most needed.”

The authors used electronic service records from GVK EMRI, matched to population-representative surveys from the International Institute for Population Sciences, and their own survey that they conducted in Gujarat in 2010 through the Collaboration for Health System Improvement and Impact Evaluation in India. The combined surveys include information on over 16,000 live births.

The public-private nonprofit provides its services free of charge and most of its beneficiaries are the poorest of the poor. Each state contributes to the ambulance system, as does the federal government. It also depends on private philanthropy among some of India’s wealthiest industrialists.

The School of Medicine in 2007 signed a formal agreement to develop an educational curriculum and train the initial group of 180 skilled paramedics and instructors. Over the years, the Stanford instructors have learned to tailor the curriculum to local needs.

About one-third of the toll-free calls to 108 — an auspicious number in India — are from women in labor. Deliveries have traditionally been done at home, particularly in rural villages, where women often die of complications. So the Stanford team has since designed a special obstetrics curriculum and helped create the country’s first protocols for obstetric care.

Grant Miller, an associate professor of medicine, core faculty member at Stanford Health Policy and senior author of the study, has worked on many health policy projects in India over the years. The results aren’t always hopeful.

“I’ve conducted a number of evaluations of large-scale health programs in India, and there are disappointingly few programs and policies that we’ve found to be effective,” said Miller, who is also director of the Stanford Center for International Development and a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. “So it’s exciting to find one that may have worked quite well.”

Miller and his fellow authors note, however, that further research on emergency medical services in other Indian states and by other providers is still needed.

“We need to do a lot more work — but these results suggest that something important has happened,” he said. “With the release of more population-representative data from more states, we’re eager to expand our analysis to the rest of the country.”

Stanford Medicine’s Center for Innovation in Global Health also supported the authors’ research in India.

Ruthann Richter, director of media relations for the medical school's Office of Communication & Public Affairs, contributed to this story.

Imagine there’s a new pill on the market. It promises you a one in 200 chance of avoiding a heart attack, stroke, heart failure or death over the next year — if you take it religiously.

It also promises a one in 60 chance of landing you in the hospital for some serious complication: Maybe you passed out. Maybe the pill affected your kidney function. Maybe you developed a severe electrolyte imbalance.

Would you take it? How would you decide?

This question is confronting some patients with hypertension as well as their health-care providers who, like me, help manage their blood pressure. The “pill” is not a pill per se, but a treatment strategy.

In November of 2015, researchers published results of a large NIH-sponsored trial known as SPRINT, which compared two systolic blood pressure treatment targets for hypertensive adults: a higher, conventional target of 140 mm mercury compared to a more stringent target of 120.  Participants in the trial were older, did not have diabetes, and were generally at high risk of developing cardiovascular disease. They were prescribed commonly used blood pressure medications, which were carefully adjusted by investigators to achieve target blood pressures.

The trial demonstrated a large relative benefit: Those in the lower target group had about a 25 percent reduction in the rate of cardiovascular disease or death. The absolute benefit, though, was small, with only about one in 200 patients avoiding cardiovascular disease or death as a result of treatment. The trial also showed that complications in the lower target group were relatively common.

As a physician, I’d love to be able to tell the patient in my exam room whether she will be the lucky one out of 200 who will benefit. That dream is still a few years off. I can, though, answer a related question. If I treat a large group of patients, on the whole, will my patients benefit? Or will the harms of treatment outweigh the benefits? And if the treatment is overall beneficial, what investment will we need to achieve this gain in health?

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To answer this question, I teamed up with a group of researchers at Stanford. Our team included experts in cost-effectiveness analysis as well as students developing clinical and analytic expertise in this area. We used data from SPRINT along with other published sources to project the expected benefits, harms and costs from targeting a lower or higher blood pressure over the course of a lifetime.

Results of our study were published this week in JAMA Cardiology. We found that targeting a lower blood pressure results in a substantial net benefit, even after accounting for harms from common, serious adverse events. This net benefit, though, doesn’t come free: An investment of about $23,777 is required for every year of life gained from this strategy.

Is $23,777 “worth it?” It’s a hard question to answer and it depends, in part, on who is paying. But in the spectrum of medical interventions that we routinely use here in the United States, this would be considered a good deal, a bargain even.

So should we go all in? Should we push stringent blood pressure targets for everyone?

No. There are a number of other considerations. SPRINT answered a specific question about hypertension treatment in a specific group of patients. Whether other groups of patients, like those at lower risk of cardiovascular disease, would benefit is unclear. There were also methodological quirks that have left the trial open to criticism.

But if we believe that the findings from SPRINT are generally correct, a lower blood pressure target seems to provide significant health gains for a reasonable cost in patients who are at high risk of developing cardiovascular disease.

Ilana B. Richman, MD, is a VA Health Services Research and Development Fellow at Stanford Health Policy.