ESRC IAA: Informing the rapidly evolving policy landscape in health care decision making in India: co-produced state specific health estimates of opportunity costs

India is currently setting up a health technology assessment agency with an aim to improve the value for money of health spending. Ensuring the agency's recommendations improve, rather than reduce, health outcomes overall requires quantifying the health that would have been possible if the money required to reimburse or fund one intervention was instead made available for other interventions (i.e., the health opportunity cost). Estimates of health opportunity costs reflect the productivity of the health care system (HCS), which depends upon, for example, the underlying demography, epidemiology, HCS infrastructure, income and other characteristics, which differ by state in India. As resource allocation decisions for health in India are made at state-level state-specific estimates of health opportunity costs are required to inform decision-making. This funding supports two workshops promoting the uptake of existing estimates of health opportunity costs for each state, as well as establishing a research agenda on this issue more generally among India-based researchers, with pathways to impact given the involvement of Indian state and national policy-makers and non-academic research users.