President's Message from Winnie Yip

iHEA News                                                           October 2021
iHEA News is the official newsletter of the International Health Economics Association.

President's Message from Winnie Yip
                          Dear iHEA members and colleagues,

                        I hope you are well. I am writing with updates regarding the upcoming
                        board elections, the 2021 Congress Report, and our new EDI Promotion
                        and Monitoring Group. First, to follow up on last month’s message
                        regarding our board elections, we are pleased to announce the
                        candidates for our open positions. Running for President-Elect will be
                        Kara Hanson and Anthony Scott; running for the two open Director
                        seats will be Josephine Borghi, Susan Cleary, Ama Fenny, Shiko
Maruyama, Manoj Mohanan, Shankar Prinja, Chris Suharlim, and Stéphane Verguet; and finally,
running for Early-Career Researcher Director will be Rui Dang, Tiara Marthias, Matthew Quaife,
Sedona Sweeney, and Andres Vecino-Ortiz. We are thrilled to have such an exceptional array of
candidates to choose from, and we hope that all members will take the time to consider their
election statements and engage with them through the online forums in the coming weeks.
Voting will be open from November 15 to November 25 and will consist of ranking the
candidates for each position in the order in which you prefer them, as the elections will employ
an instant runoff methodology. You will receive further instructions about how to vote via email
on the 15th.
Separately, the 2021 Congress Report is now available here on the iHEA website. I want to
thank everyone who responded to the post-Congress survey. We value your feedback and will
seek to incorporate it into the 2023 Congress planning. We took note of the fact that 90
percent of survey respondents indicated that they would attend another virtual Congress, were
iHEA to go that route in the future, or some combinations of in person and virtual forms. The
mean satisfaction with the 2021 Congress among respondents was 4.1 out of 5. Accordingly, we
may consider running a hybrid program in 2023. I also want to highlight the considerable
increase in abstracts submitted for organized sessions by researchers from LMICs relative to the
2019 Congress in Basel, the continued rise in the percentage of delegates located in Africa, and
the fact that roughly half of the abstract submissions were from researchers who finished
graduate school less than five years ago. We are encouraged by all of these trends and are

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optimistic that, with a sustained effort to promote diversity in the profession, they will
continue.
On that note, I also want to introduce the members of our newly formed EDI Promotion and
Monitoring Group: Tuba Saygın Avşar, Anton Avanceña, Kompal Sinha, and Eeshani Kandpal. Dr.
Saygın Avşar is a research fellow in health economics at the UCLPartners Academic Health
Science Partnership, where she is also a member of their EDI working group. She organized
Islamophobia training at the University of Birmingham while undertaking doctoral studies
there. Mr. Avanceña is in the final year of his Ph.D. in the Department of Health Management
and Policy at the University of Michigan School of Public Health, where he co-founded a student
organization dedicated to promoting sexual and gender diversity in public health and has
served as the student representative on the Student Relations Advisory Committee of the
University’s Faculty Senate. Dr. Sinha is an associate professor and research director in the
Department of Economics at Macquarie Business School. She has served as a mentor in the
mentoring programs of both iHEA and the Global Labor Organization, and she is currently
serving on the Australian Research Council’s College of Experts. Dr. Kandpal is an economist in
the Development Research Group at the World Bank, where her work focuses on how health
policy interacts with social inequalities. We are grateful to each of them for volunteering their
time and thank them for their dedication to inclusivity in our field. The iHEA Board members
serving on the EDI Promotion and Monitoring Group are: John Ataguba, Virginia Wiseman and
myself.
Keep an eye out for another email regarding board elections on November 15, but until then, I
wish you all the best.
Yours truly,
Winnie Yip
President

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Upcoming iHEA Board Elections
There will shortly be an election for several positions on the iHEA Board: two member-elected
Directors, one early career researcher Director and the President-Elect. The Nominating
Committee proactively identified possible candidates and issued an open call for nominations
from iHEA members. The candidates, listed in alphabetical order, are as follows:
President-Elect
   Kara Hanson
   Anthony Scott

Member-Elected Board Director
   Josephine Borghi
   Susan Cleary
   Ama Fenny
   Shiko Maruyama
   Manoj Mohanan
   Shankar Prinja
   Chris Suharlim
   Stéphane Verguet

Member-Elected Early Career Researcher (ECR) Director
 Rui Dang
 Tiara Marthias
 Matthew Quaife
 Sedona Sweeney
 Andres Vecino-Ortiz

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We thank the Nominating Committee, which played the central role in attracting this
impressive group of candidates.
We urge all our members to review the candidates’ election statements and CVs, engage with the
candidates in the online forum over the next few weeks, and vote between November 15 and
25. To pose questions to our candidates, simply login to the iHEA website with your username
and password, click on the link here! Click on add new post and mention the name of the
candidate to whom you would like to pose the question to in the title.

All iHEA members will receive an email with details on how to vote when the voting system
opens. There are three sections on the ballot form, one for each of the positions outlined
above.
Given that there are eight candidates for the two Director positions, and five for the ECR
Director position, we will again be using what is known as the “instant-runoff-voting” system.
This allows members to rank their preferences for candidates, in this case from 1 to 8 and 1 to 5
respectively. In terms of this voting system, the person with the least “rank 1” votes in the first
round is removed from consideration and their votes will be distributed to the remaining
candidates according to the “rank 2” preference. This process is repeated until there is one
candidate with a majority of votes (in the case of the ECR Director), or two candidates with the
highest number of votes.

                     ihea@healtheconomics.org | www.healtheconomics.org

If you are not currently an iHEA member but would like to have a say on who should serve on
iHEA’s most important governance structure and who iHEA’s future President should be …
why not join now !

Upcoming Webinars for November
Wednesday, November 3, 2021/ 12:00 PM ET
Costs of RTS,S malaria vaccination in the three malaria vaccine implementation countries
Part of the fall 2021 inaugural webinar series of the Immunization Economics SIG that focuses
on current research relevant to the immunization economics community of practice.
The malaria vaccine is being piloted in three countries—Ghana, Kenya, and Malawi—as part of
a coordinated evaluation. This talk focuses on the methods and interim results from a costing
study that estimates the introduction and delivery costs of RTS,S malaria vaccine within the
routine immunization programs in sub-national areas of the malaria vaccine pilot countries.
Organized by: Immunization Economics SIG
Speaker: Ranju Baral

REGISTER HERE

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Wednesday, November 17, 2021/ 8:00 AM ET
Integrating economic and epidemiological objectives in the optimal response to pandemics
Part of the fall 2021 inaugural webinar series of the Immunization Economics SIG that focuses
on current research relevant to the immunization economics community of practice.
There is a trade-off between economic, social and health outcomes in the control of SARS-CoV-
2 transmission. Katharina will present ongoing modelling work that supports WHO and policy
makers in middle-income countries in mitigating the pandemic as vaccination coverage is slowly
scaled up. Focus of the presentation is on DAEDALUS, the model underlying this advisory work.
DAEDALUS integrates a dynamic epidemiological model of SARS-CoV-2 transmission with a 63-
sector economic model reflecting sectoral heterogeneity in transmission and interconnected
supply chains between sectors.
Organized by: Immunization Economics SIG
Speaker: Katharina Hauck

REGISTER HERE
Tuesday, November 23, 2021
Event 1 - 8:00 AM GMT
Event 2 – 1:00 PM GMT / 9:00 AM ET

Equity-informative Economic Evaluation (EEE) SIG's Networking Events
This event will be a networking session. To meet one of our key objectives as a group: To
provide a networking space to facilitate international collaboration between health economists
interested in equity and economic evaluation, specifically related to developing early career
researcher networks. The session is open to all, we would like to particularly encourage Early
Career Researchers and those who may feel less connected globally to come along and meet
some people and share concerns.
The session will be structured with three short 5 minute spotlight sessions followed by 10
minute discussions in small groups. The small groups will be different each time to enable
people to meet as many different people as possible. The session will last one hour.
We would love to see you there.
Organized by: Equity-informative Economic Evaluation (EEE) SIG's

Event 1 (8:00 AM GMT) - REGISTER HERE
Event 2 (1:00 PM GMT) - REGISTER HERE

                    ihea@healtheconomics.org | www.healtheconomics.org

Past Webinar Recordings
If you are worried you will be unable to attend our webinars live or would live to revisit a
recording of webinar, you can visit our website to view our past webinar recordings.

Update on iHEA Special Interest Groups
The first Teaching Health Economics SIG Webinar held on October, 13th 2021: “The Health
Insurance Game - online”
More than 30 economists participated in the webinar “The Health Insurance Game - online”.
The webinar introduced an online version of the Jennifer Kohn’s famous Health Insurance
game. The main innovation is the creation of the dedicated and much sophisticated website
that is essential for facilitating the online version of the game. Participants received in advance
a description of the Health Insurance Game and a manual of the website. The webinar started
with an introduction by Florian Buchner, and Jennifer Kohn, the creator of the original game,
explained the rules of the game, Florian Buchner introduced the website and then the
participants could actively play the game as either buyers (consumers) or sellers (insurers) of
health insurance. Although this version of the game is still a work in progress, only marginal
technical problems were identified and two rounds – one scenario with symmetric information
and another one with asymmetric information - were played. Very different approaches of
insurers especially with regard to risk aversion could be seen.
After the two rounds, leaderboards of customers and insurers were shown and results were
discussed. Jürgen Wasem explained how to use the results of the game for teaching, helping
students to get familiar with basic concepts like adverse selection and risk adversity and how
the results may serve as a first step into the complex framework of health insurance systems.
We concluded with a lively discussion on what to improve in the current version of the online
game and how to continue. A look into the empirical research of higher education in the
context of this teaching approach was skipped due to lack of time, but interested participants
could receive these didactical considerations with the slides of the webinar-presentation.
The website worked well with participants from all over the world, and Zoom® and the break-
out rooms as rooms for premium negotiations did so as well (even if in-person negotiations
work better, especially from a didactical perspective). It is a big advantage of using the website
that leaderboards and results are immediately available and no data collecting and calculating
is necessary. This suggests that after the COVID-19 pandemic is over, an ideal approach could
be playing the game in its in-person version in combination with the website for data handling.
The organizers of the webinar received a lot of helpful recommendations how to further
improve the current version of the game.
For those interested in the online-version of the Health Insurance Game please let us know
(mailto:florian.buchner@fh-kaernten.at).

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