Policy Analysis:

Cost-Effectiveness of Health System and State-Level Strategies to Improve Diet and Reduce Cardiometabolic Diseases

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.

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.