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Financing prevention: opportunities for economic analysis across the translational research cycle

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Translational Behavioral Medicine

Abstract

Prevention advocates often make the case that preventive intervention not only improves public health and welfare but also can save public resources. Increasingly, evidence-based policy efforts considering prevention are focusing on how programs can save taxpayer resources from reduced burden on health, criminal justice, and social service systems. Evidence of prevention’s return has begun to draw substantial investments from the public and private sector. Yet, translating prevention effectiveness into economic impact requires specific economic analyses to be employed across the stages of translational research. This work discusses the role of economic analysis in prevention science and presents key translational research opportunities to meet growing demand for estimates of prevention’s economic and fiscal impact.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by a grant from the National Institute of Drug Abuse (R13 DA036339).

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  1. Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA

    D. Max Crowley PhD & Damon Jones PhD

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Implications

Researchers: Economic analyses have a place across all stages of translational research and offer opportunities to increase the relevance and utility of prevention science.

Practitioners: Limited resources can be leveraged to make greater impacts by considering not only evidence of program effectiveness but also of an intervention’s economic impact.

Policy makers: An increasing number of prevention strategies provide opportunities to not only improve public health but also save public resources—leading toward more efficient and accountable government.

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Crowley, D.M., Jones, D. Financing prevention: opportunities for economic analysis across the translational research cycle. Behav. Med. Pract. Policy Res. 6, 145–152 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13142-015-0354-8

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