Health cost-effectiveness calculator.
Enter a health program's annual cost, the population it reaches, and the disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) it averts. The tool returns cost per DALY averted, the standard incremental cost-effectiveness result, and a verdict against the WHO-CHOICE threshold for the comparator country. All math runs in your browser.
Outputs
Cost per DALY averted $500 against a 1x threshold of $2,530 and a 3x threshold of $7,590 (India, GDP per capita, World Bank 2023).
Sensitivity (verdict at plus or minus 30 percent)
Cost per DALY averted and verdict when program cost and DALYs averted each move by 30 percent. Rows vary cost, columns vary DALYs.
Formulas
- total_dalys = beneficiaries * dalys_per_1000 / 1000
- cost_per_daly = program_cost / total_dalys
- threshold_1x = gdp_per_capita; threshold_3x = 3 * gdp_per_capita
- cost_per_daly < 1x: highly cost-effective; 1x to 3x: cost-effective; > 3x: not cost-effective
Methodology
The cost-effectiveness ratio is the standard result in health economics: incremental cost divided by incremental effect, here cost per DALY averted (Drummond, Sculpher, Claxton, Stoddart, and Torrance, Methods for the Economic Evaluation of Health Care Programmes, 4th edition, Oxford University Press 2015). Against a no-program comparator, the incremental ratio reduces to total program cost divided by total DALYs averted.
The verdict applies the WHO-CHOICE benchmark, also associated with the Commission on Macroeconomics and Health: an intervention costing less than one times GDP per capita per DALY averted is highly cost-effective, between one and three times is cost-effective, and above three times is not cost-effective. The WHO-CHOICE 2020 update (Bertram et al., BMJ Global Health 2021, doi:10.1136/bmjgh-2020-003127) discusses the strengths and limits of these thresholds, including that they are a screening rule, not a budget-impact or opportunity-cost test.
Country thresholds use GDP per capita in current US dollars, World Bank 2023 (indicator NY.GDP.PCAP.CD), for 35 countries spanning income levels. For a full evaluation, pair this screen with a probabilistic sensitivity analysis, an explicit comparator, and a country-specific opportunity-cost threshold where one is available. Adjacent reading: the health economics practice.
Sources: Drummond et al., Methods for the Economic Evaluation of Health Care Programmes, 4th ed., Oxford University Press 2015; Bertram et al., "Methods for the economic evaluation of health care interventions for priority setting in the health system," BMJ Global Health 2021; World Bank, GDP per capita (current US$), 2023 (NY.GDP.PCAP.CD).