Person:
Van de Poel, Ellen

Global Financing Facility
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Van de Poel, Ellen
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Health Economics
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Global Financing Facility
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Last updated:January 31, 2023
Biography
Ellen Van de Poel is leading the Health Financing work program within the Global Financing Facility (GFF). Her team supports countries in developing and implementing strategies to increase domestic resources for health and improve the efficiency of health spending. Before joining the GFF, Ellen was an associate professor of Health Economics at Erasmus University Rotterdam (Netherlands). Her research focused on evaluating health financing reforms and on the measurement of equity in health and has been published in leading journals.
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https://hdl.handle.net/10986/39223

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    Improving Effective Coverage in Health: Do Financial Incentives Work?
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2022-05-11) de Walque, Damien; Kandpal, Eeshani; Wagstaff, Adam; Friedman, Jed; Neelsen, Sven; Piatti-Fünfkirchen, Moritz; Sautmann, Anja; Shapira, Gil; Van de Poel, Ellen
    In many low- and middle-income countries, health coverage has improved dramatically in the last two decades, but health outcomes have not. As such, effective coverage -- a measure of service delivery that meets a minimum standard of quality -- remains unacceptably low. This Policy Research Report examines one specific policy approach to improving effective coverage: financial incentives in the form of performance-based financing (PBF) or financial incentives to health workers on the front lines. The report draws on a rich set of rigorous studies and new analysis. When compared to business-as-usual, in low-income settings with centralized health systems PBF can result in substantial gains in effective coverage. However, the relative benefits of PBF are less clear when it is compared to two alternative approaches, decentralized facility financing which provides operating budget to frontline health services with facility autonomy on allocation, and demand-side financial support for health services (i.e., conditional cash transfers and vouchers). While PBF often results in improvements on the margins, closing the substantial gaps in effective health coverage is not yet within reach for many countries. Nonetheless, there are important lessons learned and experiences from the roll-out of PBF over the last decade which can guide health policies into the future.