I might well be missing something, but better quality of care and more “convenient” treatment (meaning people get earlier treatment) both avert deaths and save DALYs, just like getting treatment vs. not getting at all does. So doesn’t it all play into the same value proposition?
See, me missing context matters here. I was imagining that the most pessimistic scenario would be that:
ODH provides treatment for malaria which is faster, nearer & more convenient
but patients would have otherwise gotten the same treatment, just later, further away and paying more costs to get it
So the value of ODH wouldn’t be the value of the treatment, it would be the value of making it more convenient
But as you point out (“Quality of care is important—but perhaps even more important like @Ray_Kennedypointed out is how quickly people get the treatment. Malaria is an exponentially replicating parasite, and hours can make a differece.”) you can’t just neatly separate getting faster care from getting better care. There are some fun things you could do with distributions, i.e., explicitly model the benefit as a function of how fast you get treatment, and then estimate the counterfactual value as
∫∫ (Value of getting treatment in h hours—Chance of having otherwise gotten treatment in (h + x) hours instead × Value of getting treatment in (h + x) hours) dx dh
(where the double integral just means that you are explicitly estimating the value of each possible pair of x and h and then weighing them according to how likely they are)
But I think this would be overkill, and only worth coming back to do explicitly if/when ODH is spending a few million a year. Still they might add some clarity if we don’t do the calculations. Anyways, best of luck.
See, me missing context matters here. I was imagining that the most pessimistic scenario would be that:
ODH provides treatment for malaria which is faster, nearer & more convenient
but patients would have otherwise gotten the same treatment, just later, further away and paying more costs to get it
So the value of ODH wouldn’t be the value of the treatment, it would be the value of making it more convenient
But as you point out (“Quality of care is important—but perhaps even more important like @Ray_Kennedy pointed out is how quickly people get the treatment. Malaria is an exponentially replicating parasite, and hours can make a differece.”) you can’t just neatly separate getting faster care from getting better care. There are some fun things you could do with distributions, i.e., explicitly model the benefit as a function of how fast you get treatment, and then estimate the counterfactual value as
∫∫ (Value of getting treatment in h hours—Chance of having otherwise gotten treatment in (h + x) hours instead × Value of getting treatment in (h + x) hours) dx dh
(where the double integral just means that you are explicitly estimating the value of each possible pair of x and h and then weighing them according to how likely they are)
But I think this would be overkill, and only worth coming back to do explicitly if/when ODH is spending a few million a year. Still they might add some clarity if we don’t do the calculations. Anyways, best of luck.