Maximizing the Benefit is a tool designed for HIV prevention community planning groups and health departments to set priorities among different interventions to prevent new HIV infections. The central component of the tool is a spreadsheet designed to help you estimate the relative cost-effectiveness of these different interventions. While estimates of cost effectiveness are far from precise and cost-effectiveness is not the only criterion to be used in prioritizing interventions, these calculations can be very useful in establishing approximate rankings of the relative cost-effectiveness of different interventions. They also can help people planning and implementing prevention programs to focus these programs on those outcomes that will have the greatest benefit. Maximizing the Benefit also contains a priority-setting tool to help you rank different interventions based on a combination of cost-effectiveness and several other important factors (such as feasibility and acceptability of the intervention), including factors that you can choose yourself.
Note: The tool was modified as of Feb. 06, 2004 to reflect the change in the parameter “per-injection probability of virus transmission by an infected needle.” The value was changed from 0.07 to 0.0067 (ref.: Kaplan and Heimer, 1992). The change leads to new cost-effectiveness estimates of drug treatment programs, needle exchange programs, and needle deregulation.
