Vol. 1 No. 1 (2023)
Longitudinal Multilevel Regression Analysis of Cost-Effectiveness in Ethiopian Community Health Centre Systems: A Methodological Evaluation (2000–2026)
Abstract
{ "background": "Evaluating the cost-effectiveness of community health centre systems in low-resource settings requires analytical methods that account for hierarchical data structures and longitudinal cost variations. Existing approaches often fail to adequately model the complex interdependencies between facility-level inputs and population-level health outcomes over time.", "purpose and objectives": "This study aims to methodologically evaluate the application of longitudinal multilevel regression for measuring cost-effectiveness in a national community health system. It assesses the model's capacity to isolate the marginal effect of system-level investments on disability-adjusted life years averted, controlling for contextual confounders.", "methodology": "A longitudinal study design was employed, analysing panel data from a national cohort of community health centres. The core statistical model is a three-level random intercepts regression: $\\text{ln}(\\text{Cost}{ijt}) = \\beta0 + \\beta1\\text{Outcome}{ijt} + \\zeta{i} + \\zeta{ij} + \\epsilon_{ijt}$, where $i$, $j$, and $t$ index district, health centre, and time, respectively. Parameters were estimated using Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods, with inference based on 95% credible intervals.", "findings": "The methodological evaluation indicates that the multilevel approach successfully partitions variance, attributing approximately 65% of cost variation to the district level. A key empirical result is that a 10% increase in supervised community health worker coverage was associated with a 3.2% reduction in cost per DALY averted (95% CrI: 1.8% to 4.5%), demonstrating the model's utility for identifying specific efficiency drivers.", "conclusion": "Longitudinal multilevel regression provides a robust methodological framework for cost-effectiveness analysis in decentralised community health systems, offering superior handling of clustered data and temporal dynamics compared to standard regression techniques.", "recommendations": "Health systems researchers should adopt longitudinal multilevel modelling for economic evaluations in similar contexts. Policymakers should
Read the Full Article
The HTML galley is loaded below for inline reading and better discovery.