MBA (Strathclyde Business School)

Analytical Support for Decision Making

Assignment 2019-20

Preamble

This assignment accounts for 50% of the overall mark for the ASDM Class (the end-of-class exam accounts for the remaining 50%).

The aims of the assignment are to engender a good understanding of, and skills in, the following aspects of the ASDM class:

• Using a spreadsheet to make sense of data;
• Conducting and interpreting statistical analyses on a data set of reasonable size;
• Using multi-criteria decision analysis to structure and inform a decision.
• Presenting your analyses in visual and written form;

The assignment is group based. Because of the amount of work involved in this assignment you should work with a group of other students on this assignment.

The report for this assignment should have three parts. The division of marks and a page length guide for the three parts is summarised below.  All parts are compulsory – your group will not receive an overall mark unless you submit a credible attempt for each part.

The overall report length must not exceed 30 pages, including appendices.

Note:  we assume a page to be A4, single-spaced, 11 point characters – i.e. around 300 words.  

You should submit one report per group.  You should also include:

• A copy of the Excel file used for your analysis for Part 2.
• A copy of your VISA file used for your analysis for Part 3.

You will be advised of the deadline for submission of this assignment, and subsequent return of marks, by your MBA Administrator.

A copy of the blank assignment feedback form is available on Myplace so that you have visibility of the marking criteria and marks breakdown.

This assignment has been set by the MBA ASDM Teaching Team 2019-20

Introduction to the Decision-Making Context

Your group has been hired as consultants for the Sub-Saharan Africa Fund for Health (SAFH).

The SAFH has an annual budget of US$500 million per year for funding health programmes in Sub-Saharan Africa. The shortlist of countries they consider funding healthcare programmes in are Benin, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Congo, Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea, Mauritania, Niger, Togo, and Zambia. SAFH allocate their funding to programmes in these countries which target specific diseases or areas of health, with the goal of reducing the overall disease burden. To achieve that aim, in recent years the SAFH has, for example, funded programs to fight malaria in Burundi, diarrheal diseases in Niger, and tuberculosis in Togo.

The SAFH has recently undergone a funding review, which has led to a number of changes. The review found that their decision-making process for allocating money to countries and disease areas was opaque. The SAFH Board of Directors has decided that the organization needs to have a more rigorous and transparent methodology for their decisions. Additionally, based on the recent United Nations Sustainable Development Goal to achieve “financial risk protection, access to quality essential health-care services and access to safe, effective, quality and affordable essential medicines and vaccines for all,” the SAFH Board decided that they should fund programmes that reduce households’ out-of-pocket healthcare expenditure. They are aware that household out-of-pocket health expenditure can push households into poverty, and they believe that reducing this burden should be considered alongside reducing the disease burden.

The SAFH have the funds to launch two new programmes in one country this year. You have been asked to carry out an appropriate range of analyses which enable you to provide a suitable report for the SAFH, recommending a priority list of 4-5 diseases/disease areas within one country to fund as well as providing evidence for the recommendation.

The Problem

The SAFH want you to recommend how to prioritize investment in 4-5 diseases in one country. For example, a priority list for Benin could be:

1. malaria;
2. neonatal disorders;
3. tuberculosis;
4. and maternal disorders.

Note: this list is just an example, and it is not based on any analysis.

The SAFH want their investment to reduce the disease burden and to protect households from potentially catastrophic out-of-pocket expenditure on healthcare. They also want to achieve stakeholder buy-in, and stakeholders may have additional or differing goals.

The organization has decided on two reliable sources of data they believe will continue to be updated yearly, and they want you to use these data to advise them on which country and which disease/disease areas they should focus on. The data are provided to you in two excel files (ASDM Assignment GHE Data.xlsx and ASDM Assignment GBD Data.xlsx), and their respective sources are:

• the World Health Organization (WHO) Global Health Expenditure Database (http://apps.who.int/nha/database/);
• and the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) data produced by the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington (http://ghdx.healthdata.org/gbd-results-tool).

The SAFH management has indicated they want you to combine these datasets and use them to make recommendations they can present the Board of Directors. SAFH expect you to produce a report in the required three parts, each of which is described in more detail below.

Note: It is important to consider how you will approach your analysis for both the decision analysis and the data analysis together since Part 3 is dependent on Part 2. Each part of the analysis should support your progression towards recommending one country to receive funding, along with a prioritised list of diseases/disease areas recommended to receive funding.

Part 1: Executive Report

The Executive Report will be used by the SAFH senior management and the Board of Directors to make funding decisions. This report should present your recommended priority list for SAFH funding in one country and other key findings. This report should be supported by the evidence presented in the technical reports of your analysis.

Part 2: Technical Report on Data Analysis

Your first task is to conduct a thorough analysis of the data provided and to write a detailed technical report. The SAFH plan to publish the technical report to ensure a transparent process, and they want their staff to use the methodology you develop in the future. Your technical report should include evidence to back your key findings as well as to explain the methodology to the SAFH analysts.

The SAFH expect the analysis to compare countries’ relevant key indicators—their current state and through time. They suggest that you may want to define performance measures to aid the decision-making; these should be focused on the stated aims of the SAFH. They are keen to see comparisons across multiple countries, and suggest you select around 6 countries.

Note: Do not constrict your analysis to one country at this point. SAFH have indicated they expect two levels of analysis:

• Exploratory analysis using summary statistics and visualization: SAFH would like you to focus on 4-5 indicators and performance measures and compare these for around 6 countries.
• Inferential analysis: SAFH are also aware of more advanced analysis such as inference using confidence intervals and models such as regression. Management does not know which of these methods is appropriate, though they believe it is important to understand the uncertainty of investment impact and they understand that funding will not have the same impact in all countries and for all diseases. They would like to understand 4-5 relationships between outcomes (outcomes can be either indicators or performance measures, but should support/provide your key findings from the analysis). Since they will make this report public, the methodology will be scrutinized by experts in the field.

As a minimum, your analysis should include:

• A statement of the purpose of analysis;
• A description of your methodology, so that it is transparent to, and reproducible by, the SAFH analysts;
• An explanation of the data cleansing and preparation process;
• An explanation of the indicators and countries selected for exploratory analysis, justifying these choices in terms of the aims of the SAFH;
• A discussion of the appropriate selection, use and interpretation of visual displays and summary statistics/performance measures;
• An explanation of the relationships selected for inference, again justifying these choices in terms of the aims of the SAFH and the purpose of your data analysis;
• Appropriate interpretation of the inference for prediction;
• A clear set of key findings evidenced by your analysis.

Your Technical Report should allow the SAFH to provide a technical audit of your analytical process and findings.

You must include a copy of the Excel file that you have used for the analysis.

Part 3: Technical Report on Multi-Attribute Value Analysis

Limit your multi-attribute value analysis to only one of the countries considered in your data analysis. There is no one correct country to choose, but your choice should be influenced by the findings of your data analysis.

The SAFH Board wants you to recommend a priority funding list for your selected country. The Board understands that the decision on which diseases to invest their funds is challenging and that there are many competing issues that must be managed. For example, they believe people will have differing views on issues such as:

• whether reducing the disease burden or the financial burden on households is more important;
• and whether funding should be given where it has the largest effect or where it will help the most vulnerable.

SAFH want to make their decision process transparent, and to achieve buy-in for their decisions they also want to capture stakeholders’ views. A non-exhaustive list of stakeholders includes the country’s health ministry, other branches of government, advocacy groups in the country, and donors to the SAFH.

Analyse the decision problem facing the SAFH using multi-attribute value analysis supported by the V.I.S.A software.

HINT: Each group member should role play different actors within this decision problem. For example, roles include the analyst, the facilitator and different stakeholders. This will give you the opportunity to mimic real-life and the experience of managing or participating in the decision analysis.

Your report on the analysis should:

• Explain why and how you chose a particular country for your decision analysis;
• Discuss the roles you played and how you used the CAUSE framework or other approaches to support your problem structuring;
• Clearly identify and explain your selection of alternatives;
• Discuss the development of a value tree for the analysis of alternatives;
• Explain the process of scoring and weighting you have used (and include a table or graph of values);
• Discuss the synthesis of information for each stakeholder and compare results across stakeholders;
• Carry out appropriate sensitivity analyses and outline what you learned from these;
• Recommend a course of action (this may be a decision, a need to consider further alternatives, a need to design a more robust or better compromise alternative etc).

You should include carefully chosen visual displays to illustrate your report.

You must include a copy of the V.I.S.A. file that you have used for the analysis.