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.
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.
The FairChoices project is supported by a multidisciplinary team that combines expertise in product development, data analytics, evidence and research. This collaborative structure ensures that technical development, data analysis, and evidence-based decision-making are fully integrated across the platform.
Product Team
The Product Team comprises of a product manager, two full-stack developers, one backend developer and a data analyst. They are responsible for designing, implementing, and maintaining the core features of the platform, ensuring robust, scalable, and high-performance system functionality. The team ensures seamless integration with analytics components, applies best practices in software development and system design, and collaborates closely with multidisciplinary teams to translate requirements into functional, efficient, and user-friendly solutions.
The Analytics Team includes a Data Analytics Lead and three Data Analysts. This team manages central data analysis workflows, develops analytical pipelines, and ensures the quality, consistency, and reliability of outputs. They oversee data quality through validation, cleaning, and harmonization, and coordinate closely with country-level data analysts, research team to incorporate contextual insights and validate country-specific datasets.
The Evidence Team includes an Evidence Team Lead and three Research Scientists. They are responsible for curating input data on the effectiveness and costs of the interventions featured in FairChoices. They conduct focused literature reviews to continually update and improve the evidence base for the tool, and to ensure standardization, they oversee similar work being done within the country teams. Additionally, they engage with topic-specific experts who are part of the Disease Control Priorities network.
The core team will coordinate closely with data analysts from each country team. Each country team contributes part of their data analytical capacity to support the core FairChoices analyses. In addition, researchers involved in the project provide methodological guidance, interpret findings, and ensure that research evidence informs the platform’s development and analytical outputs.
This multidisciplinary collaboration ensures that the platform integrates technical, analytical, and research expertise, producing contextually relevant and high-quality results for decision-making.
Our Collaborators and Their Teams
We work with leading institutions and researchers worldwide to advance health priority setting
