Cost Effectiveness of Mobile Health for Antenatal Care and Facility Births in Nigeria

Background: The use of mobile technology in the health sector, often referred to as mHealth, is an innovation that is being used in countries to improve health outcomes and increase and improve both the demand and supply of health care services. This study assesses the actual cost-effectiveness of initiating and implementing the use of the mHealth as a supply side job aid for antenatal care. The study also estimates the cost-effectiveness ratio if mHealth was also used to encourage and track women through facility delivery. Methods: The methodology utilized a retrospective, micro-costing technique to extract costing data from health facilities and administrative offices to estimate the costs of implementing the mHealth antenatal care program and estimate the cost of facility delivery for those that used the antenatal care services in the year 2014. Five different costing tools were developed to assist in the costing analysis. Findings: The results show that the provision of tetanus toxoid vaccination and malaria prophylaxis during pregnancy and improved labor and delivery during facility delivery contributed the most to mortality reductions for women, neonates and stillbirths in mHealth facilities versus non-mHealth facilities. The cost-effectiveness ratio of this program for antenatal care and no demand-side generation for facility delivery is US$13,739 per life saved. The cost-effectiveness ratio adding in an additional demand-side generation for facility births reduces to US$9,806 per life saved. Conclusion: These results show that mHealth programs are inexpensive and save a number of lives for the dollar investment and could save additional lives and funds if women were also encouraged to seek facility delivery

Short and longer-term impacts of health insurance on catastrophic health expenditures in Kwara State, Nigeria

© 2022, The Author(s).Background: Out-of-pocket health expenditures (OOPs) constitute a significant proportion of total health expenditures in many low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), leading to an increased likelihood of exposure to financial catastrophe in the event of illness. Health insurance has the potential to reduce catastrophic health expenditures (CHE), but rigorous evidence of its sustained impact is limited, especially in LMICs. This study examined the short- and longer-term effects of a health insurance program in Kwara State, Nigeria on CHE. Methods: The analysis is based on a panel dataset consisting of 3 waves of household surveys in program and comparison areas. The balanced data consists of 1,039 households and 3,450 individuals. We employed a difference-in-differences (DiD) regression approach to estimate intention-to-treat effects, and then computed average treatment effects on the treated by combining DiD with propensity score weighting and an instrumental variables analysis. CHE was measured as OOPs exceeding 10% of household consumption and 40% of capacity-to-pay (CTP). Results: Using 10% of consumption as a CHE measure, we found that living in the program area was associated with a 4.3 percentage point (pp) decrease in CHE occurrence (p < 0.05), while the effect on insured households was 5.7 pp (p < 0.05). The longer-term impact four years after program introduction was not significant. Heterogeneity analyses show a reduction in CHE of 7.2 pp (p < 0.01) in the short-term for the poorest tercile. No significant effects were found for the middle and richest terciles, nor in the longer-term. Households with a chronically ill member experienced a reduction in CHE of 9.4 pp (p < 0.01) in the short-term, but not in the longer-term. Most estimates based on the 40% of CTP measure were not statistically significant. Conclusion: These findings highlight the critical role of health insurance in reducing the likelihood of catastrophic health expenditures, especially for vulnerable populations such as the poor and the chronically ill, and by extension in achieving universal health coverage. They also show that the beneficial impacts of health insurance may attenuate over time, as households potentially adjust their health-seeking behavior to the new scheme