About FairChoices
FairChoices is a cutting edge support tool for health sector priority setting in low- and middle-income countries. Users can build national health benefit packages comprised of more than 100 interventions from 82 countries.
Users can measure, forecast, and optimize the impact of benefit packages on outcomes such as life expectancy, financial risk protection, and equity.
Kjelle Arne Johansson
Professor
Øystein A. Haaland
Professor
Our Story
In 2010, at a hostel in Ethiopia, professors Kjell Arne Johansson and Ole Frithjof Norheim from University of Bergen were discussing priority setting in resource constrained settings. Together, they calculated the health benefits gained from interventions, but they quickly saw the need for a more comprehensive and powerful tool that could assess health care interventions according to multiple criteria.
In 2012, statistician and R-programmer Øystein A. Haaland started his tenure as a postdoctoral fellow and almost immediately started collaborating with Johansson. Still, it was not until 2014 that the first lines of FairChoices code were written.
David Watkins was involved with FairChocies in 2019, and he was looking for a computational tool that could bring the global DCP-3 project to a more evidence based and quantitative direction. FairChoices is now under Bergen Centre for Ethics and Priority Setting in Health (BCEPS) and the main analytics tool for DCP4.
Core Modeling Team
Prasanna Tuladhar
Head Engineer
Andrew Dawson
Product Manager
Jan-Magnus Økland
Head Engineer
Castory Munishi
Researcher
Erick Andrews
Research Scientist
William Msemburi
Research Scientist
Olav Nicolay Larsson Aga
Engineer
Markus Lossius Opdahl
Engineer
Our Collaborators and Their Teams
University of Washington
- Responsible for cost model in FairChoices
- Assists programming, database design, and evidence synthesis
- Studies cost-effectiveness evidence in policy processes
- Improves tool’s user interface and user experience
Team members
- Sarah Pickersgill
- Tricia Aung
- Beth Dunbar
Center for Integration
- Models intervention costs
- Develops the integration optimization model for FairChoices
- Supports country engagement and contextualization using Time Driven Activity Based Costing (TDABC).
Team members
- Chantelle Boudreaux
- Matt Coates
Harvard T.H. Chan School
of Public Health
- Develops methods for quantifying the equity and financial protection impacts of interventions
- Optimizes the inclusion of financial risk protection into essential benefits packages
The Creation of BCEPS
The Bergen Centre for Equity and Priority Setting or BCEPS was made possible by generous contributions from the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (NORAD), the Trond Mohn Foundation, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, also led to the hiring of more technical staff and the recruitment of new students at both master and PhD level.
The Ministries of Health in
- Ethiopia
- Zanzibar
- Malawi
- Ghana
- Nepal
- Tanzania
- Nigeria
- Cameroon
- The Ghambia
