TY - JOUR
T1 - Strategic Planning in Population Health and Public Health Practice
T2 - A Call to Action for Higher Education
AU - Phelps, Charles
AU - Madhavan, Guruprasad
AU - Rappuoli, Rino
AU - Levin, Scott
AU - Shortliffe, Edward
AU - Colwell, Rita
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2016 Milbank Memorial Fund.
PY - 2016/3/1
Y1 - 2016/3/1
N2 - Policy Points: Scarce resources, especially in population health and public health practice, underlie the importance of strategic planning. Public health agencies' current planning and priority setting efforts are often narrow, at times opaque, and focused on single metrics such as cost-effectiveness. As demonstrated by SMART Vaccines, a decision support software system developed by the Institute of Medicine and the National Academy of Engineering, new approaches to strategic planning allow the formal incorporation of multiple stakeholder views and multicriteria decision making that surpass even those sophisticated cost-effectiveness analyses widely recommended and used for public health planning. Institutions of higher education can and should respond by building on modern strategic planning tools as they teach their students how to improve population health and public health practice. Context Strategic planning in population health and public health practice often uses single indicators of success or, when using multiple indicators, provides no mechanism for coherently combining the assessments. Cost-effectiveness analysis, the most complex strategic planning tool commonly applied in public health, uses only a single metric to evaluate programmatic choices, even though other factors often influence actual decisions. Methods Our work employed a multicriteria systems analysis approach - specifically, multiattribute utility theory - to assist in strategic planning and priority setting in a particular area of health care (vaccines), thereby moving beyond the traditional cost-effectiveness analysis approach. Findings (1) Multicriteria systems analysis provides more flexibility, transparency, and clarity in decision support for public health issues compared with cost-effectiveness analysis. (2) More sophisticated systems-level analyses will become increasingly important to public health as disease burdens increase and the resources to deal with them become scarcer. Conclusions The teaching of strategic planning in public health must be expanded in order to fill a void in the profession's planning capabilities. Public health training should actively incorporate model building, promote the interactive use of software tools, and explore planning approaches that transcend restrictive assumptions of cost-effectiveness analysis. The Strategic Multi-Attribute Ranking Tool for Vaccines (SMART Vaccines), which was recently developed by the Institute of Medicine and the National Academy of Engineering to help prioritize new vaccine development, is a working example of systems analysis as a basis for decision support.
AB - Policy Points: Scarce resources, especially in population health and public health practice, underlie the importance of strategic planning. Public health agencies' current planning and priority setting efforts are often narrow, at times opaque, and focused on single metrics such as cost-effectiveness. As demonstrated by SMART Vaccines, a decision support software system developed by the Institute of Medicine and the National Academy of Engineering, new approaches to strategic planning allow the formal incorporation of multiple stakeholder views and multicriteria decision making that surpass even those sophisticated cost-effectiveness analyses widely recommended and used for public health planning. Institutions of higher education can and should respond by building on modern strategic planning tools as they teach their students how to improve population health and public health practice. Context Strategic planning in population health and public health practice often uses single indicators of success or, when using multiple indicators, provides no mechanism for coherently combining the assessments. Cost-effectiveness analysis, the most complex strategic planning tool commonly applied in public health, uses only a single metric to evaluate programmatic choices, even though other factors often influence actual decisions. Methods Our work employed a multicriteria systems analysis approach - specifically, multiattribute utility theory - to assist in strategic planning and priority setting in a particular area of health care (vaccines), thereby moving beyond the traditional cost-effectiveness analysis approach. Findings (1) Multicriteria systems analysis provides more flexibility, transparency, and clarity in decision support for public health issues compared with cost-effectiveness analysis. (2) More sophisticated systems-level analyses will become increasingly important to public health as disease burdens increase and the resources to deal with them become scarcer. Conclusions The teaching of strategic planning in public health must be expanded in order to fill a void in the profession's planning capabilities. Public health training should actively incorporate model building, promote the interactive use of software tools, and explore planning approaches that transcend restrictive assumptions of cost-effectiveness analysis. The Strategic Multi-Attribute Ranking Tool for Vaccines (SMART Vaccines), which was recently developed by the Institute of Medicine and the National Academy of Engineering to help prioritize new vaccine development, is a working example of systems analysis as a basis for decision support.
KW - cost-effectiveness
KW - population health
KW - public health practice
KW - systems analysis
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U2 - 10.1111/1468-0009.12182
DO - 10.1111/1468-0009.12182
M3 - Article
C2 - 26994711
AN - SCOPUS:84963959685
SN - 0887-378X
VL - 94
SP - 109
EP - 125
JO - Milbank Quarterly
JF - Milbank Quarterly
IS - 1
ER -