OneHealth Tool

The OneHealth Tool is a software tool designed to inform national strategic health planning in low- and middle-income countries.

While many costing tools take a narrow disease-specific approach, the OneHealth Tool attempts to link strategic objectives and targets of disease control and prevention programmes to the required investments in health systems. The tool provides planners with a single framework for scenario analysis, costing, health impact analysis, budgeting and financing of strategies for all major diseases and health system components. It is thus primarily intended to inform sector wide national strategic health plans and policies.

Outputs from an application will help planners answer the following questions:

• What would be the health system resources needed to implement the strategic health plan (e.g., number of nurses and doctors required over the next 5-10 years)?
• How much would the strategic plan cost, by year and by input?
• What is the estimated health impact?
• How do costs compare with estimated available financing?

The development of the OneHealth tool is overseen by the UN InterAgency Working Group on Costing (IAWG-Costing). WHO provides technical oversight to the development of the tool, facilitates capacity building and provides technical support to policy makers to inform national planning and resource needs estimates. The first official version of the OneHealth Tool was released in May 2012. Since then the tool has been applied in over 55 countries to date, most of which in sub-Saharan Africa.

Updated versions of the software are regularly released. Recent developments include an expanded Malaria Impact module, and a module for Neglected Tropical Diseases. Please contact the WHO-CHOICE team at [email protected] for more information or visit their team website by clicking here.

The OneHealth Tool can be downloaded from the Avenir Health website.

In order to enable and encourage country-level cost-effectiveness analysis that uses local data, WHO has developed a new user-friendly platform.  Here country analysts can conduct cost-effectiveness analysis using the Spectrum generalized cost-effectiveness tool. If they wish, they can then proceed to assess health system implications and financial costs, using the OneHealth Tool to inform the design of health benefit packages and overall health strategies. The availability of cost-effectiveness analysis in the same platform as the OneHealth Tool allows users to apply the same set of impact models and cost data for both types of analysis.

Country-estimates can be derived for a range of diseases and risk factors. The tool is populated with country-specific default information on epidemiology and estimated costs (quantities and prices). Epidemiology and cost data can be changed by the country user to more locally relevant information.

Undertaking a country contextualization of a CHOICE analysis generally requires collaboration between the country user and the WHO-CHOICE team, which can take various forms.

To discuss your research plans and to obtain the country contextualization tools, please contact [email protected].