What to do next
Show the working, step by step
Where I used this
Through Praava Health’s partnership with Lifebuoy, we took health access to population scale, with about 3,000 calls a day.
Read the case: Population-scale access via the Lifebuoy partnership →Everything is calculated in your browser. Nothing you type is sent or stored.
Prevention pays, if you count the right costs
Prevention programs are often judged against treatment budgets alone, and lose. The case usually rests on what illness costs a household and an economy: lost wages, missed school, carer time. This calculator keeps the model simple so the assumptions stay visible: one period, no discounting, and the risk reduction applied to those who take part.
- Use the best evidence you have for the risk reduction, ideally a trial or systematic review for the same intervention and population.
- Be honest about take-up. A strong effect with low take-up prevents few cases; that is often the real problem to solve.
- Report cost per case prevented next to ROI. It lets funders compare programs of very different sizes.
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Building the case for a prevention program?
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Questions
How do you calculate the return on a prevention program?
Estimate cases prevented as people reached × take-up × baseline risk × risk reduction. Multiply by the cost of each case to get costs averted, then ROI = (costs averted − program cost) ÷ program cost.
What is cost per case prevented?
Program cost divided by cases prevented. It shows what it costs to stop one case, and is easier to compare across programs than ROI.
Which costs should a case include?
At minimum, treatment costs. A fuller picture adds lost income, school days, carer time and long-term care. State which you included.
Are the program examples real?
The risk reductions come from published trials and reviews, cited under each example. Population, take-up and cost numbers are illustrative.