Projecting Universal Health Coverage: Forecasting Progress in Health and Society at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation

• In Event: Modeling Health Futures: Practices of Assuming, Anticipating, and Forecasting - III

Abstract

For their publication of the 2017 Global Burden of Disease, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation continued their work on developing tools to monitor progress on the health-related Sustainable Development Goals. The newest step in this process was using “a forecasting platform that systematically captures the effects of independent drivers of population health into the future to generate projections through 2030” (Lozano et al. 2018). The institute’s shift to forecasting was in response to an explicit demand from the Gates Foundation in its 2014 re-up grant, and the forecasting platform for the health SDGs requires the incorporation – for the sake of temporal and geographic comparison – forecasting the socio-demographic index (SDI), which the authors call “a composite measure of overall development.” Projecting SDI into the future requires producing estimations on progress around “rescaled values of fertility, education, and income” based on mathematical models composed of past progress and assumption of future progress on these issues. Attempting to produce mathematical reason around societal progress, IHME’s ultimate models of whether countries will achieve health goals are based on a foundational model of assumed societal progress which themselves feed into the larger projections – they build health models off of societal models that both rely on the same assumed estimations. What is the ultimate value of these projections of projections, and what do tensions within the team about the problematic nature of the SDI say about the larger role of these projections in global health?

Author

• Marlee Tichenor, University of Edinburgh