Harvard University T.H. Chan School of Public Health Details Findings in Managed Care (Optimizing health, financial risk protection, and equity in health benefits package design toward universal health coverage): Managed Care

2026 AUG 14 (NewsRx) -- By a News Reporter-Staff News Editor at Insurance Daily News -- New research on Managed Care is the subject of a report. According to news reporting from Boston, Massachusetts, by NewsRx journalists, research stated, “Health policymakers are often challenged with balancing multiple objectives within the constraints of a limited budget. These objectives typically include enhancing (i) population health, (ii) providing financial risk protection, and (iii) improving health equity.”

The news correspondents obtained a quote from the research from the Harvard University T.H. Chan School of Public Health, “We introduce quantitative methods to guide the design of essential benefits packages (EBPs) that explicitly account for trade-offs across these three critical objectives under budgetary limitations. We develop a mathematical optimization model that evaluates the fulfillment of these objectives for a spectrum of potential candidate health interventions under various options of public funding. Utilizing tri-criterion integer programming, our model identifies an optimal set of interventions for inclusion. We illustrate the approach with a case study of EBP design in Ethiopia. We found that the optimal EBP’s intervention mix is sensitive to the comparative prioritization of the three objectives and the available budget; and that the number of Pareto-optimal intervention combinations changes nonlinearly with the available budget. When all three objectives are integrated, the composition of the optimal EBP is strongly influenced by the relative preferences placed on each objective.”

According to the news reporters, the research concluded: “The mathematical optimization framework proposed can empower policymakers to design health policies that synergistically address multiple efficiency and equity objectives within defined financial limits.”

This research has been peer-reviewed.

For more information on this research see: Optimizing health, financial risk protection, and equity in health benefits package design toward universal health coverage. Social Science & Medicine, 2026;406:119579. Social Science & Medicine can be contacted at: Pergamon-elsevier Science Ltd, The Boulevard, Langford Lane, Kidlington, Oxford OX5 1GB, England. (Elsevier - www.elsevier.com; Social Science & Medicine - http://www.journals.elsevier.com/social-science-and-medicine/)

Our news journalists report that additional information may be obtained by contacting Sophia Houhamdi, Dept. of Global Health and Population, Harvard University T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, MA, United States. Additional authors for this research include Boshen Jiao, Fentabil Getnet, Mengyao Wang, Kathrin Durizzo, Richmond Owusu, David A. Watkins, Solomon Tessema Memirie and Stephane Verguet.

Publisher contact information for the journal Social Science & Medicine is: Pergamon-elsevier Science Ltd, The Boulevard, Langford Lane, Kidlington, Oxford OX5 1GB, England.

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