Economic evaluation of combination vaccines: a checklist for assessing their benefits and challenges

This brief from PATH and the World Health Organization (WHO) presents a new checklist tool designed to support more comprehensive economic evaluations of combination vaccines. Developed through a literature review, consultations with immunization stakeholders and health economics experts, the tool aims to address longstanding gaps in how the value of combination vaccines is assessed. The brief highlights how traditional economic evaluations often fail to capture broader programmatic, health system, household, and beneficiary-level impacts associated with combination vaccines, particularly in low- and middle-income countries where crowded immunization schedules and constrained health system resources are major concerns.

Key insights

• The checklist organizes value drivers into several domains, including coverage and health impact, financial costs, opportunity costs, beneficiary experience, safety, and equity.
• The framework uses four prioritization dimensions—resonance with policymaker priorities, magnitude of impact, quantifiability, and fit within existing economic evaluation frameworks—to help analysts determine which metrics are most relevant and feasible to include.
• The checklist identifies several high-priority areas for inclusion in future evaluations, including vaccine coverage, disease burden outcomes, commodity costs, health worker time, and household costs, while also highlighting important research gaps for metrics that are highly relevant but difficult to measure or integrate into existing frameworks.

Thumbnail image credit: PATH