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health systems

How can health systems “systematic reviews” actually become systematic?

Adam Wagstaff's picture

From Karl Pillemer’s post on Cornell’s Evidence-Based Living blogIn my post “Should you trust a medical journal?” I think I might have been a bit unfair. Not on The Lancet, which I have since discovered, via comments on David Roodman’s blog, has something of a track record of publishing sensational but not exactly evidence-based social science articles, but rather on Ernst Spaan et al. for challenging the systematicness of their systematic review of health insurance impacts in developing countries. It’s not that I now think Spaan et al. did a wonderful job. It’s just that I think they probably shouldn’t have been singled out in the way they were.

Humanizing health systems

Adam Wagstaff's picture

In 1960, I wouldn’t have been writing this blog post. For a start I was just a baby at the time. Second, we were several decades away from 1994 when Justin Hall – then a student at Swarthmore – would sit down and tap out the world’s first blog. Most importantly of all, though, according to Google’s ngram viewer, people didn’t write about health systems much in 1960 (see chart). Usage of the term in books took off only in the mid 1960s, waned in the 1980s, and then started rising again in the 1990s. This doesn’t look like a statistical artifact. Usage of the term “Nobel prize” has stayed relatively constant over the period, and while the term “health economics” has also trended upwards, the growth has been much slower. So “health systems” is a fairly new term – and it’s on the rise.

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Not everyone thinks that’s a good thing.

Health System Innovation in India Part I: India’s health system challenges

Adam Wagstaff's picture

India’s health system faces some major challenges. In some respects, the hill India’s health system has to climb is steeper than that facing other developing countries. The good news is that the innovation that India is famous for in other sectors, as well as in health technology, is now starting to make itself felt in the health system. Not only may these ideas benefit India’s poor; they may also provide food for thought for other countries.

In this post, we sketch out the challenges facing India’s health system. In the next two, we outline two innovative approaches—one government, one private—in the state of Andhra Pradesh.