Lives Saved Tool (LiST) costing: a module to examine costs and prioritize interventions

Abstract

BackgroundAchieving the Sustainable Development Goals will require careful allocation of resources in order to achieve the highest impact. The Lives Saved Tool (LiST) has been used widely to calculate the impact of maternal, neonatal and child health (MNCH) interventions for program planning and multi-country estimation in several Lancet Series commissions. As use of the LiST model increases, many have expressed a desire to cost interventions within the model, in order to support budgeting and prioritization of interventions by countries. A limited LiST costing module was introduced several years ago, but with gaps in cost types. Updates to inputs have now been added to make the module fully functional for a range of uses.MethodsThis paper builds on previous work that developed an initial version of the LiST costing module to provide costs for MNCH interventions using an ingredients-based costing approach. Here, we update in 2016 the previous econometric estimates from 2013 with newly-available data and also include above-facility level costs such as program management. The updated econometric estimates inform percentages of intervention-level costs for some direct costs and indirect costs. These estimates add to existing values for direct cost requirements for items such as drugs and supplies and required provider time which were already available in LiST Costing.ResultsResults generated by the LiST costing module include costs for each intervention, as well as disaggregated costs by intervention including drug and supply costs, labor costs, other recurrent costs, capital costs, and above-service delivery costs. These results can be combined with mortality estimates to support prioritization of interventions by countries.ConclusionsThe LiST costing module provides an option for countries to identify resource requirements for scaling up a maternal, neonatal, and child health program, and to examine the financial impact of different resource allocation strategies. It can be a useful tool for countries as they seek to identify the best investments for scarce resources. The purpose of the LiST model is to provide a tool to make resource allocation decisions in a strategic planning process through prioritizing interventions based on resulting impact on maternal and child mortality and morbidity.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (10.1186/s12889-017-4738-1) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Pushing the envelope through the Global Financing Facility: potential impact of mobilising additional support to scale-up life-saving interventions for women, children and adolescents in 50 high-burden countries

“…Availability of resources for the funding of high-priority RMNCAH-N interventions was modelled by year and by country for three scenarios: historic trend, GFF conservative and GFF ambitious. Resource availability in the first year of the period was set equal to the cost of achieving actual coverage rates for that year, derived from the LiST Costing 4 tool. Expenditure on RMNCAH-N priority interventions was grouped by four sources according to shares estimated in the literature 5 —public domestic, development assistance for health, out-of-pocket (OOP) payments and private prepaid (ie, private health insurance) plus efficiency gains which are treated as an extra source of resources.…”

“…Costs associated with the delivery of interventions spanning across the continuum of care were calculated and compared using the LiST Costing 4 module, the OneHealth Tool (OHT), and Excel analysis. Service delivery costs were estimated based on volume of clients and include cost categories for drugs and consumables, labour and the costs of inpatient days and outpatient visits.…”

“…CHOICE costs represent the whole service delivery cost; LiST costing disaggregates labour, other recurrent and capital costs within the visit/day cost. 4 13 …”

Are there decision support tools that might strengthen the health system for perinatal care in South African district hospitals? A review of the literature

“…a) Enables a consolidated analysis across programs while considering financial capacity of the health system [30]…”

“…The AIM estimates the impact of changes of Human Immunodeficiency Virus incidence, prevention and treatment measures on mortality [23]. Further additions have recently been made to LiST to enhance the accuracy of estimates of the cost implications of increasing coverage of interventions [30, 35].…”