Answering the question: are we making a difference?

Excerpt

Performance-based payment schemes are nothing new for not-for-profit organizations that use commercial business models, such as social marketing and social franchise programs. Perhaps because of their familiarity with using output-based budgeting processes, these programs have advanced the development of different types of modeling techniques for describing impacts on health outcomes, and applied these estimates to monitor programs worldwide. Tried and true estimates of health status have been used in new ways, and innovative estimates of equity are reported. Each of these developments is discussed in this special supplement, and each has something to say about the metrics that are used, and the usefulness of the results they produce. …