Policy Analysis:
Cost-Effectiveness of Health System and State-Level Strategies to Improve Diet and Reduce Cardiometabolic Diseases
Overview
While considerable evidence supports and informs the likely benefits of policy innovations within and outside health systems to improve diet and reduce cardiometabolic diseases (CMD), their impacts on health, disparities, costs, and cost-effectiveness are not well established. Because major diet-related disparities persist, assessing effects of such strategies in at-risk subgroups is crucial. Administrative and legal challenges can strongly influence implementation, scale-up, and sustainability of such strategies, but such considerations have not yet been rigorously assessed.
Our specific aims extend our prior analyses of national policies to address crucial questions for health system strategies and state-specific actions and to disseminate this evidence. Building on our prior experience, we will evaluate health system interventions, state interventions, and administrative/legal feasibility. We will define plausible policy effect sizes and their uncertainty based on reviews of literature and expert contacts and adopt a micro-costing approach using established methods to assess policy costs including by sectors. We will also project costs and CMD benefits of each policy using established modeling approaches and quantify comparative efficiency of each intervention.
This project is also part of the Friedman School’s larger collection of Food-PRICE projects.
Project Aims
Aim One
To estimate the health impacts, costs, cost-effectiveness, and effects on disparities of specific health system strategies to improve diet and reduce CMD in the US;
Aim Two
To investigate intersections of FIM with other levels of healthcare interventions including
coordinated food insecurity screening and SNAP enrollment; and new clinical drug treatments;
Aim Three
To assess the administrative and legal challenges and feasibility of specific health system and state strategies to improve diet and reduce CMD in the US; and
Aim Four
To disseminate our top findings from the prior period, related grants, and this new work to relevant stakeholders in key legislative, agency, and advocacy positions.
Project Details
Principal investigator
Dariush Mozaffarian
Director, Food is Medicine Institute, Distinguished Professor, Jean Mayer Professor of Nutrition, Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy
TUFTS Team
Sean Cash
Bergstrom Foundation Professor in Global Nutrition, Food is Medicine Institute, Friedman School of Nutrition Science & Policy
Fred Cudhea
Biostatistician, Food is Medicine Institute, Friedman School of Nutrition Science & Policy
Shuyue (Amy) Deng
PhD Candidate, Food is Medicine Institute, Friedman School of Nutrition Science & Policy
Julia Reedy Sharib
Senior Research Coordinator, Manager of Communications, Food is Medicine Institute, Friedman School of Nutrition Science & Policy
Lu Wang
Research Assistant Professor, Food is Medicine Institute, Friedman School of Nutrition Science & Policy
John B. Wong
Interim Chief Scientific Officer, Tufts Medical Center, Food is Medicine Institute, Friedman School of Nutrition Science & Policy
Collaborators
Katie Garfield
Clinical Instructor, Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation of Harvard Law School
Kurt Hager
Instructor, Population & Quantitative Health Sciences, University of Massachusetts Medical School
David D. Kim
Assistant Professor of Medicine, Biological Sciences Division and the College, The University of Chicago
Jennifer Pomeranz
Assistant Professor of Public Health Policy and Management, NYU School of Global Public Health
Funder
NIH R01 Grant
Timeline
2019 – 2024