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India, as part of its bid to achieve universal health coverage, has expanded government health programs over the last two decades, most notably with the establishment of the National Health Mission and the rollout of public health insurance programs targeting poor households. However, national spending on health remains among the lowest in the world. As the government increasingly takes on the role of purchaser of health care, decisions about the allocation of scarce resources for health will have substantial fiscal and health consequences and must be based on evidence. Additionally, in order to control costs and effectively address the growing chronic disease burden, public programs will need to find ways to integrate curative hospital services with the most cost-effective preventive and primary interventions. Currently, in part because the evidence base on economic evaluations of health interventions in India remains sparse and of low quality, decisions about which health care services to cover are typically made by expert committees rather than through systematic assessments of efficacy and cost-effectiveness.

However, in recent years, the government has taken several steps towards establishing the infrastructure for evidence-based priority setting and resource allocation, including the establishment of a body for Health Technology Assessment in India (HTAIn) within the Department of Health Research to collate and generate evidence on the clinical efficacy and cost-effectiveness of new and existing health technologies and programs. Research evidence on the cost-effectiveness of both preventive and curative health interventions in the Indian context is going to be a critical input to the HTAIn.

With vaccines against SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, on the near-term horizon, U.S. policymakers are focusing on how to ensure that Americans get vaccinated. This challenge has been compounded by reports that White House officials are exerting undue influence over the agencies that would ordinarily lead such efforts, the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Stanford Health Policy’s Joshua Salomon, a professor of medicine and senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and colleagues developed a mathematical model to examine the potential for contact tracing to reduce the spread of the coronavirus. They modeled contact tracing programs in the context of relaxed physical distancing under different assumptions for case detection, tracing coverage and the extent to which contact tracing can lead to effective quarantine and isolation.

In a recent perspective published by the New England Journal of Medicine(NEJM), Stanford Law student Alexandra Daniels analyzed a growing body of federal litigation brought by prisoners with the hepatitis C virus (HCV) who are seeking access to treatment for their condition. With co-author and mentor, Law Professor David Studdert — also a professor of medicine at Stanford Health Policy — Daniels documented the dire public health problem of HCV in prisons.

Background:
Empirical evidence suggests that the uptake of maternal and child health (MCH) services is still low in poor rural areas of China. There is concern that this low uptake may detrimentally affect child health outcomes. Previous studies have not yet identified the exact nature of the impact that a conditional cash transfer (CCT) has on the uptake of MCH services and, ultimately, on child health outcomes. The objective of this study is to examine the relationship between CCT, uptake of MCH services, and health outcomes among children in poor rural areas of western China.

Methods:
We designated two different sets of villages and households that were used as comparisons against which outcomes of the treated households could be assessed. In 2014, we conducted a large-scale survey of 1522 households in 75 villages (including 25 treatment and 50 comparison) from nine nationally designated poverty counties in two provinces of China. In each village, 21 households were selected based on their eligibility status for the CCT program. Difference-in-difference analyses were used to assess the impact of CCT on outcomes in terms of both intention-to-treat (ITT) and average-treatment-effects-on-the-treated (ATT).

Results:
Overall, the uptake of MCH services in the sample households were low, especially in terms of postpartum care visits, early breastfeeding, exclusive breastfeeding, and physical examination of the baby. The uptake of the seven types of MCH services in the CCT treatment villages were significantly higher than that in the comparison villages. The results from both the ITT and ATT analyses showed that the CCT program had a positive, although small, impact on the uptake of MCH services and the knowledge of mothers of MCH health issues. Nonetheless, the CCT program had no noticeable effect on child health outcomes.

Conclusions:
The CCT program generated modest improvements in the uptake of MCH services and mothers’ knowledge of MCH services in poor rural areas of Western China. These improvements, however, did not translate into substantial improvements in child health outcomes for two potential reasons: poor CCT implementation and the low quality of rural health facilities.

Taiwan is 81 miles off the coast of mainland China and was expected to have the second highest number of cases of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) due to its proximity to and number of flights between China. The country has 23 million citizens of which 850 000 reside in and 404 000 work in China. In 2019, 2.71 million visitors from the mainland traveled to Taiwan. As such, Taiwan has been on constant alert and ready to act on epidemics arising from China ever since the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) epidemic in 2003. Given the continual spread of COVID-19 around the world, understanding the action items that were implemented quickly in Taiwan and assessing the effectiveness of these actions in preventing a large-scale epidemic may be instructive for other countries.