Stephen Resch

Stephen Resch is decision scientist with primary research interests in the economic evaluation of health programs and the optimization of health care delivery systems.  He brings to his research a broad understanding of health policy and extensive training in resource allocation, economic evaluation, cost-effectiveness analysis, decision theory, simulation, and epidemiology, as well as practical skill in managing and executing applied research. He has developed mathematical models to estimate the financial, economic, and health impact of tuberculosis and HIV interventions, HPV vaccine, and maternal health policies. He has conducted economic impact studies of malaria bednets, antiretroviral treatment and cost-effectiveness studies of various health technologies including new vaccines.

His published work includes evaluations of tuberculosis control policies in international settings, HIV screening policies for female prisoners in the U.S., family housing policies for migrant South African miners, the estimation of long-term care needs among aging inmates in California state prisons, as well as economic evaluations of surgical safety interventions.

Dr. Resch has also developed costing models and decision tools such as HAPSAT (USAID Health Systems 2020) for assessing the resource needs for HIV/AIDS programs, a Vaccine Delivery Costing Tool (PAHO ProVac) for use in planning HPV vaccine rollouts, and he is actively advising a PAHO teams developing EPI program costing tool, and a cost-effectiveness model for cervical cancer prevention that integrates cervical screening and HPV vaccination. Under a grant from the MacArthur Foundation (Sue Goldie, PI), he is currently developing a maternal health policy planning tool for national and sub-national program planning. Recently, Dr. Resch provided technical expertise and analysis to Global Fund in support of their effort to develop new policies for country eligibility, counterpart financing, and (application) prioritization.

He has developed study designs and data collection instruments for projects ranging from an evaluation of intensive case management for HIV positive detainees in U.S. jails to the estimation of maternal health resources in Nigerian health facilities.  He has experience working in-country with donor organization representatives, ministries of health, and NGOs on technical assistance projects both in sub-Saharan Africa and in the LAC region. He has designed and conducted trainings in sustainability analysis and strategic planning for HIV programs in Nigeria and Zambia (USAID) and economic evaluation of immunization programs in the Latin American Caribbean region for PAHO’s ProVac Initiative.

Dr. Resch is Deputy Director of the Center for Health Decision Science at the Harvard School of Public Health and a member of the school’s faculty in the Department of Health Policy and Management where he teaches introductory cost-effectiveness analysis and an advanced methods course in economic evaluation of health programs. He co-directs Harvard Global Health Institute’s Decision Science Working Group and is Deputy Chair of the Harvard School of Public Health Comparative Effectiveness Initiative.