UCSF Team Awarded Multimillion-Dollar Agreement with CDC
A UC San Francisco-based team has been awarded a multimillion-dollar, five-year cooperative agreement with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to conduct economic modeling of disease prevention in five areas: HIV, hepatitis, STI (sexually transmitted infections), TB (tuberculosis), and school health. The team, led by James G. Kahn, MD, MPH, and Paul Volberding, MD, both faculty in Global Health Sciences, is a multi-institution consortium, with 39 investigators across UCSF; Stanford University; UC Berkeley, UC Davis, UC San Diego; the San Francisco Department of Public Health, Health Strategies International, and PATH. It will be based at the UCSF Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies.
The consortium was awarded $1.6 million for the first year, and $8 million over the full project period. Called CAPE (Consortium for the Assessment of Prevention Economics), it will conduct economic analyses including costing, cost-effectiveness analysis, cost-benefit analysis, resource allocation, and return on investment.
“We are looking at five different health areas, using a range of economic methods – this breadth is very unusual for an economics project,” said Kahn. “We are also excited about collaborating with colleagues in the Bay Area and throughout California.”
The project advances the UCSF Global Health Sciences vision for research that crosses and links disease areas, and that integrates economics with basic and applied science. While CAPE’s geographic focus is the United States, modeling methods and tools can be adapted to global settings, using local data on population and disease characteristics.
CAPE is the largest award arising from the UCSF Global Health Economic Consortium, established in 2013.
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Professor Kahn and colleagues established the Global Health Economic Consortium (GHECon) to galvanize UCSF health economics capacity to address major challenges in international and domestic health, via locally-tailored analyses and to advance global health economics. GHECon has 42 members representing all four schools at UCSF and numerous departments including medicine, obstetrics and gynecology, surgery, orthopedics and ophthalmology.