Research Projects
HSEi conducts clinical trials and research across the healthcare landscape.CHEER Programme
Cancer research has generally focused on outcomes in patient symptoms functionality, longevity, or mortality (without analyzing economic outcomes). HSEi’s Cancer Health Economics & Evaluation Research (CHEER) Programme is helping measure and evaluate the economics behind prevention programmes. This economic lens enables the fair allocation and utilization of available cancer services.
The CHEER Programme focuses on building capacity, producing local and continental knowledge on cancer financing, and evaluating the economics of cancer care and delivery systems. Through the CHEER Programme, HSEi strives to inform the equitable distribution of quality cancer care services, uncovering where the largest reductions in mortality can be achieved.
As a costing study, the CHEER Programme can contribute to the prioritization of healthcare expenditures while informing choices between different treatments, or advocating for additional resources when the benefits of treatment outweigh the costs.
Developing skills, systems, and tools for cancer health economics research
Conducting economic analyses and evaluations of cancer care
Assessing the scope, quality, delivery and distribution of cancer care services
Redesigning Systems of Cancer Care Delivery (REDESIGN CANCER)
South Africa’s Mpumalanga and Eastern Cape Provinces face similar challenges. They lack the necessary infrastructure, resources, and expertise to provide quality, safe, and accessible radiotherapy, chemotherapy, palliative care, and surgical cancer services. Patients from rural communities—who generally cannot afford private health care and depend on state-run health facilities—need to travel long distances to urban tertiary cancer care centres for treatment. This adds time and costs, and often prevents people from accessing care.
With support from HSEi, these two provinces have started decentralising cancer care delivery. Decentralised cancer care services ensure that patients:
- Get access to quality care closer to where they live
- Receive early screening and diagnosis
- Avoid slow referrals and unnecessary delays to treatment
- Save costs and travel time
Exploring strategies that improve access to quality cancer services
Understanding how various components of the cancer care delivery chain can be implemented closer to communities in need
Determining how decentralized cancer care improves outcomes, enhances patient experience, and reduces the economic burden of cancer care
Hospital Performance Project
HSEi works with partners to build a deeper understanding of hospital performance. Through its Hospital Performance Project, HSEi researches:
- The role hospitals play at different levels of care
- How hospital services are planned, organised, funded, governed, and administered
- How hospital care providers learn and stay informed
- How hospitals ensure the cost-effective, safe, and efficient provision of quality clinical care
- How the health sector plans, organises, funds and governs the academic health platform
HSEi’s Hospital Performance Project focuses on public hospitals, including district hospitals, regional hospitals, tertiary hospitals, central hospitals, and specialised hospitals. The performance measurement offered through the programme helps policymakers understand hospital outcomes, assess the quality of health services, and create institutional accountability. It also provides a framework that allows hospital performance to be evaluated against clearly defined indicators.