Millions of people in Sub-Saharan Africa rely on private clinics, but regulation and enforcement of quality care in private facilities is generally weak, and the private healthcare sector is not structured to ensure either quality or affordability. These issues have impelled governments and NGOs to turn their attention to improving care in private facilities. Thus far, many programs have aimed to solve individual constraints to providing high-quality health care, but few have intervened on multiple fronts simultaneously. Researchers from UC Berkeley and UCSF will evaluate the impact of a multi-pronged private healthcare initiative on healthcare utilization, quality of care, clinic financial outcomes, and child health outcomes in Kenya.

Researchers Paul Gertler (UC Berkeley) and Dominic Montagu (UCSF) will use a randomized evaluation to evaluate both the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of the AHME program at improving quality of care, service utilization, access to high-quality care, and health outcomes. While the initiative is taking place in Ghana, Kenya and Nigeria, the initiative is being evaluated only in Ghana and Kenya, and the randomized evaluation is occurring in Kenya only.

In Kenya, the researchers will randomly assign private clinics that meet criteria for selection into the AHME program to either a treatment or comparison group. Clinics in the treatment group will be invited to participate in AHME immediately, while clinics in the comparison group will be recruited into AHME after the evaluation is complete.

Clinics participating in AHME will receive five interventions:

1.     Social franchising: Private providers will be trained and certified to deliver standardized care under a franchised brand. The brand aims to signal to the client that the clinic offers high-quality services. Local and national marketing for the brand aim to build demand for the franchised services.

2.     SafeCare: The program provides participating clinics with a standardized assessment of facility quality, support in developing quality improvement plans, and incentives for clinics to improve quality of care. 

3.     Medical Credit Fund: The fund provides strategic planning support tied to performance-based financing to eligible SafeCare-participating clinics.

4.     Demand-side financing: AHME will facilitate registration with Kenya’s National Health Insurance Fund for SafeCare-participating clinics that meet a minimum standard of quality.

5.     Information and communications technology (ICT): Mobile phones and other technology will be utilized to enable clinic personnel to, among other things, collect data and directly reach clients.

Data will be collected over a four-year period at both the clinic and household level to measure healthcare utilization, quality of care, clinic financial outcomes, and child health outcomes.

The impact evaluation in Kenya will be a collaborative effort between Innovations for Poverty Action and researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, who will lead the overall evaluation, and the University of California, San Francisco, who will lead the accompanying qualitative evaluation.

The qualitative evaluation will take place in Ghana and Kenya over the same four-year period to complement the quantitative findings. The qualitative evaluation will explore provider and client attitudes towards quality of health and options for care and will describe the AHME operation processes and their effects on the overall markets and institutional environments in which they function. Members of the research team will conduct in-depth interviews with providers participating in AHME and their clients and carry out focus group discussions in communities surrounding AHME facilities. The researchers will also conduct key informant interviews with AHME partner organizations and other key project stakeholders.