Economic evaluation of disease elimination: an extension to the net benefits
framework and application to human African trypanosomiasis
The net benefits framework has become a mainstay of the cost-effectiveness literature, guiding decision-makers to select among strategies in the presence of budget constraints and imperfect information. However, disease elimination programs are socially desirable but not always cost-effective. Therefore, analytical frameworks are necessary to consider the additional premium for reaching global goals that are beyond the cost-effective use of country resources. We propose a modification to the net benefits framework to consider the implications of switching from an optimal strategy (in terms of cost-per-burden-averted) to a strategy with a higher likelihood of meeting the global target (i.e. elimination of transmission by a specified date). Our expanded framework informs decisions under uncertainty, determines the share of funding necessary to align local and global priorities, enabling local partners to use their resources efficiently while cooperating to meet global health targets. We illustrate the advantages of our framework by considering the economic case of efforts to eliminate transmission by 2030 of gambiense human African trypanosomiasis (gHAT), a vector-borne parasitic disease in West and Central Africa. Significance Statement Various diseases have now been earmarked for elimination by the global health community. While the health economic implications of elimination have been discussed before, one important topic remains unexplored: uncertainty and its consideration within extant cost-effectiveness frameworks. Here we extend the ubiquitous net benefits framework to consider the comparative efficiency of alternative elimination strategies when these strategies have different probabilities of reaching elimination. We evaluate the premium of elimination, and we apply our method to efforts against human African trypanosomiasis in three settings. This method could be directly applied to simulation-based studies of the cost-effectiveness of other disease elimination efforts, therefore giving the global health community a common metric by which to budget for such initiatives.