Discover the history, mission, and the dedicated team of experts behind the FairChoices platform.
Our Story
The origins of FairChoices trace back to 2010 in Ethiopia, where Professors Kjell Arne Johansson and Ole Frithjof Norheim from the University of Bergen recognized a critical challenge: the need for effective health priority setting in resource-constrained environments. While calculating the health benefits of various interventions, they identified the necessity for a more comprehensive, multi-criteria analytical tool to evaluate healthcare strategies.
In 2012, statistician and R-programmer Øystein A. Haaland joined the university as a postdoctoral fellow and began collaborating with Professor Johansson. This partnership laid the technical groundwork for the platform, culminating in the development of the first FairChoices code in 2014.
The project expanded significantly in 2019 when David Watkins joined the initiative. Seeking a robust computational tool to steer the global Disease Control Priorities (DCP-3) project toward a more quantitative, evidence-based approach, he integrated FairChoices into their workflow. Today, FairChoices operates under the Bergen Centre for Ethics and Priority Setting in Health (BCEPS) and serves as the primary analytical tool for DCP-4.
What We Do
FairChoices is an advanced decision-support tool designed to guide health sector priority setting in low- and middle-income countries. The platform empowers policymakers and researchers to design national health benefit packages drawing from over 100 interventions across 82 countries. Through FairChoices, users can accurately measure, forecast, and optimize the impact of these packages on critical outcomes, including life expectancy, financial risk protection, and health equity.
The Creation of BCEPS
The establishment of the Bergen Centre for Ethics and Priority Setting in Health (BCEPS) was made possible through generous funding from the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (Norad), the Trond Mohn Foundation, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. This vital support has not only facilitated the continuous expansion of our technical team but also fostered the recruitment of dedicated Master’s and Ph.D. students to advance research in global health equity.
