
Net Value in Diabetes Management
Research Focus
As rising longevity and declining fertility rates drive population aging around the world, health systems confront the challenge of promoting healthy aging. Reducing the complications associated with chronic diseases like diabetes is critical to addressing this challenge. Since 1980, the burden of diabetes, both in terms of prevalence and number of adults affected, has increased at a greater rate in low-income and middle-income countries than in high-income countries. About 80% of adults with diabetes today live in low-to-middle income countries, with the largest increase in absolute numbers in East Asia and South Asia.
The Net Value in Diabetes Management research project, led by Shorenstein APARC’s Asia Health Policy Program (AHPP), compares health care use, medical spending, and clinical outcomes for patients with diabetes in Asia and other parts of the world as a lens for understanding the economics of caring for patients with complicated chronic diseases across diverse health systems.
This international collaborative research brings together teams of clinicians and health economists in ten health systems (and growing): China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan, as well as the United States and The Netherlands. Together, the teams analyze big data—detailed, longitudinal patient-level information for large samples from each country, including millions of records of clinical encounters, health-check-up, and medical spending—to compare the health care use and patient outcomes for adults with type 2 diabetes in their health systems. The teams draw on previous methods for assessing net value as discussed in a 2009 study co-authored by Karen Eggleston, the project’s principal investigator and AHPP director.
The project aims to quantify the quality improvement associated with changes in medical technology, and to provide an evidence base for policies to improve the delivery of quality, cost-effective diabetes management coordinated across outpatient and inpatient settings. It contributes to each multidisciplinary team’s input for learning healthcare systems, as well as to health economics research on value for money across distinctive health service delivery systems.
The project is part of a broader research agenda seeking to assess productivity in health care with appropriate adjustments for quality. It has led to an extended study that is specifically focused on health policy reforms and chronic disease management in India and China (funded by the Stanford Center at Peking University).

Karen Eggleston

Other Collaborators
Publications
Development and Validation of the CHIME Simulation Model to Assess Lifetime Health Outcomes of Prediabetes and Type 2 Diabetes in Chinese Populations: A Modeling Study
PLOS Medicine, June 2021
See also A New Validated Tool Helps Predict Lifetime Health Outcomes for Prediabetes and Type 2 Diabetes in Chinese Populations, APARC website, July 2021
Cost-effective Interventions to Prevent Non-communicable Diseases: Increasing the Evidence Base in India and Other Low- and Middle-income Settings
BMC Medicine, December 2020
See also How to Prevent Diabetes and Other Chronic Diseases Cost-Effectively, APARC Website, December 2020
Asia Health Policy Program Leads Workshops on Diabetes Research in Seoul and Busan
APARC Website, December 2019
APARC website, August 2018
Avoidable Hospital Admissions From Diabetes Complications In Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, And Communities Outside Beijing
Health Affairs, November 2017
Related Events
Healthy Aging and Chronic Disease Management in China and India
July 2018
Global Type 2 Diabetes: More Than What Meets the Eye
January 2018
Strategies and Tactics to Address Chronic Disease Burden in India
November 2017
International Comparison of Net Value in Diabetes Management: A Transatlantic Workshop
March 2017