A Markov Model Cost-Effectiveness Analysis Of Measles Vaccination In China’s Floating Population

The immunization of epidemic diseases is a fundamental component of public health, as well as an essential element of government budget:on one hand, the public good character of immunization services determines the necessity of government intervention; on the other hand, the provision of effective vaccination plays an important role in stabilizing the society, promoting economic growth and enhancing comprehensive national strengths. Nowadays, most vaccine immunization programs, especially basic immunization in the world rely on the government financial support, and this phenomenon is more obvious in developing countries. What kind of health care policy should be set up to balance the increasing pressures on health care budgets and the growing demands to provide effective vaccination to the citizens? People are questioning the value of money that being invested in immunization programs. Not only the medical analysis would evaluate the value of vaccination, but also the public finance researchers and decision makers should keep close look on the economic evaluation of vaccine immunization which has nowadays led to increasing interests globally. Based on this desire from public health decision makers, we accomplished this paper.To perform an economic evaluation of vaccination, we need to first determine the object, the type of vaccine, the extension of economic evaluation and the research method in our study. Based on the fact that there’s very rare literature analyzing issues of developing countries, we decide to focus on China’s reality. Since the immunity level in floating population has chronically been low, we set floating population in our country as our object group. As we are approaching the deadline of achieving measles elimination goals set by the WHO Regional Committee of the Western Pacific Region, it’s meaningful to analyze the measles vaccination situation in China, since we have joint the plan and made promises but hasn’t reached the goal yet. We choose to do the evaluation from a public decision maker’s perspective, taking into consideration the economic and social value of vaccination to do a cost-effectiveness analysis. Referring to the analysis method, we applies Markov model to make innovation in our paper. We establish a model and accomplish the evaluation by performing a cohort simulation as well as calculating morbidity, death rate, life utility and other indicators. Specifically, we conduct comparison analysis in our study:by comparing the situation of "vaccination" and "no vaccination" we try to clarify the effect of vaccination; by comparing the immunization influence on both resident population and floating population, we try to figure out the particularity of the migrants.Our main conclusion is in favor of the cost-effectiveness of vaccinating floating population in a long run. Although in a short period of time vaccinating resident population saves more cost in the society, it’s undeniable that the immunization of migrants also brings benefits to the patients and to the public. Vaccination of floating population in China is a crucial work which can not be neglected, requiring plenty of attention and fund support from the government.