Health Equity and Financial Protection

Two key policy goals in the health sector are equity and financial protection. New methods, data and powerful computers have led to a surge of interest in quantitative analysis that permits monitoring progress toward these objectives, and comparisons across countries. ADePT is a new computer program that streamlines and automates such work, ensuring that results are genuinely comparable and allowing them to be produced with a minimum of programming skills. This book provides a step-by-step guide to the use of ADePT for quantitative analysis of equity and financial protection in the health sector. It also gives the reader an accessible guide to the concepts and methods used by the software, as well as more detailed technical explanations.

'During the past 20 years, an increasingly standardized set of tools have been developed to analyze equity in health outcomes and health fi nancing. Hitherto, the application of these analytical methods has remained the province of health economists and statisticians. This book and the accompanying software democratize the conduct of such analyses, offering an easily accessible guide to equity analysis in health without requiring sophisticated data analysis skills.' --Sara Bennett, Associate Professor, Department of International Health, Bloomberg School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, United States

'As the international health community becomes increasingly focused on monitoring the impact of universal coverage initiatives, ADePT Health will help make the standard techniques more accessible to policy makers and analysts, increase the comparability of health equity and fi nancial protection measures, and aid in generating the evidence needed to support policy.' --Kara Hanson, Reader in Health System Economics, Health Policy Unit, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, United Kingdom

'The ADePT software and manual make it possible for researchers without extensive statistical training to perform a range of analyses that will provide an important evidence base for introducing universal coverage reforms and for monitoring if these reforms are achieving their objectives. The ADePT initiative is an exciting and timely development that will enable researchers in low- and middle-income (as well as high-income) countries to undertake health and health system equity analyses that would previously have been lengthy and extremely resource intensive.' --Di McIntyre, Professor, School of Public Health and Family Medicine, University of Cape Town, South Africa