Dataset Information

Willingness to pay for an early warning system for infectious diseases.

ABSTRACT: Early warning systems for infectious diseases and foodborne outbreaks are designed with the aim of increasing the health safety of citizens. As a first step to determine whether investing in such a system offers value for money, this study used contingent valuation to estimate people's willingness to pay for such an early warning system in six European countries. The contingent valuation experiment was conducted through online questionnaires administered in February to March 2018 to cross-sectional, representative samples in the UK, Denmark, Germany, Hungary, Italy, and The Netherlands, yielding a total sample size of 3140. Mean willingness to pay for an early warning system was €21.80 (median €10.00) per household per month. Pooled regression results indicate that willingness to pay increased with household income and risk aversion, while they decreased with age. Overall, our results indicate that approximately 80-90% of people would be willing to pay for an increase in health safety in the form of an early warning system for infectious diseases and food-borne outbreaks. However, our results have to be interpreted in light of the usual drawbacks of willingness to pay experiments.

SUBMITTER: Himmler S

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7364296 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Willingness to pay for an early warning system for infectious diseases.

Himmler Sebastian S van Exel Job J Perry-Duxbury Meg M Brouwer Werner W

The European journal of health economics : HEPAC : health economics in prevention and care 20200316 5

Early warning systems for infectious diseases and foodborne outbreaks are designed with the aim of increasing the health safety of citizens. As a first step to determine whether investing in such a system offers value for money, this study used contingent valuation to estimate people's willingness to pay for such an early warning system in six European countries. The contingent valuation experiment was conducted through online questionnaires administered in February to March 2018 to cross-sectio ...[more]

PMID: 32180067

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Project description:Wheat rust diseases pose one of the greatest threats to global food security, including subsistence farmers in Ethiopia. The fungal spores transmitting wheat rust are dispersed by wind and can remain infectious after dispersal over long distances. The emergence of new strains of wheat rust has exacerbated the risks of severe crop loss. We describe the construction and deployment of a near realtime early warning system (EWS) for two major wind-dispersed diseases of wheat crops in Ethiopia that combines existing environmental research infrastructures, newly developed tools and scientific expertise across multiple organisations in Ethiopia and the UK. The EWS encompasses a sophisticated framework that integrates field and mobile phone surveillance data, spore dispersal and disease environmental suitability forecasting, as well as communication to policy-makers, advisors and smallholder farmers. The system involves daily automated data flow between two continents during the wheat season in Ethiopia. The framework utilises expertise and environmental research infrastructures from within the cross-disciplinary spectrum of biology, agronomy, meteorology, computer science and telecommunications. The EWS successfully provided timely information to assist policy makers formulate decisions about allocation of limited stock of fungicide during the 2017 and 2018 wheat seasons. Wheat rust alerts and advisories were sent by short message service and reports to 10 000 development agents and approximately 275 000 smallholder farmers in Ethiopia who rely on wheat for subsistence and livelihood security. The framework represents one of the first advanced crop disease EWSs implemented in a developing country. It provides policy-makers, extension agents and farmers with timely, actionable information on priority diseases affecting a staple food crop. The framework together with the underpinning technologies are transferable to forecast wheat rusts in other regions and can be readily adapted for other wind-dispersed pests and disease of major agricultural crops.

Project description:BackgroundTelemedicine is increasingly being leveraged, as the need for remote access to health care has been driven by the rising chronic disease incidence and the COVID-19 pandemic. It is also important to understand patients' willingness to pay (WTP) for telemedicine and the factors contributing toward it, as this knowledge may inform health policy planning processes, such as resource allocation or the development of a pricing strategy for telemedicine services. Currently, most of the published literature is focused on cost-effectiveness analysis findings, which guide health care financing from the health system's perspective. However, there is limited exploration of the WTP from a patient's perspective, despite it being pertinent to the sustainability of telemedicine interventions.ObjectiveTo address this gap in research, this study aims to conduct a systematic review to describe the WTP for telemedicine interventions and to identify the factors influencing WTP among patients with chronic diseases in high-income settings.MethodsWe systematically searched 4 databases (PubMed, PsycINFO, Embase, and EconLit). A total of 2 authors were involved in the appraisal. Studies were included if they reported the WTP amounts or identified the factors associated with patients' WTP, involved patients aged ≥18 years who were diagnosed with chronic diseases, and were from high-income settings.ResultsA total of 11 studies from 7 countries met this study's inclusion criteria. The proportion of people willing to pay for telemedicine ranged from 19% to 70% across the studies, whereas the values for WTP amounts ranged from US $0.89 to US $821.25. We found a statistically significant correlation of age and distance to a preferred health facility with the WTP for telemedicine. Higher age was associated with a lower WTP, whereas longer travel distance was associated with a higher WTP.ConclusionsOn the basis of our findings, the following are recommendations that may enhance the WTP: exposure to the telemedicine intervention before assessing the WTP, the lowering of telemedicine costs, and the provision of patient education to raise awareness on telemedicine's benefits and address patients' concerns. In addition, we recommend that future research be directed at standardizing the reporting of WTP studies with the adoption of a common metric for WTP amounts, which may facilitate the generalization of findings and effect estimates.

Dataset Information

Willingness to pay for an early warning system for infectious diseases.

Publications

Willingness to pay for an early warning system for infectious diseases.

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