Call for Proposals – Pilot Projects for Research on Subnational Burden of Disease
CHTF periodically funds one- to two-year pilot projects to conduct novel social science research that expands the evidence base and understanding related to health and aging. Applications that leverage Global Burden of Disease (GBD) data, bring an international focus to understanding health outcomes and health disparities, or examine trends at the subnational country level are particularly welcome. Individual awards usually range from $15,000 to $75,000 each. Indirect costs are not allowed. Funded projects are expected to generate presentations and publications that will form the basis of further applications to the National Institute on Aging, the National Institutes of Health, or other funding bodies. We will be announcing the next call for pilot projects soon.
Pilot Project Guidelines & Eligibility
Pilot project awards are open to social scientists at any institution worldwide who qualify to have principal investigator status within their home institution. All pilot awards are subject to the National Institutes of Health approval and, where relevant, foreign clearance process.
Researchers who have not previously worked on the determinants of population health are prioritized, but all eligible applicants are encouraged to apply. While we do not have funding for all ideas, we welcome collaboration and are enthusiastic about engaging in conversation with researchers who are interested in working more closely with us as affiliates of the center. Researchers awarded pilots will either be or become affiliates of the Center for Health Trends and Forecasts.
2018–2019 Pilot Awards
Frailty assessment in the Global Burden of Disease study: Research of global patterns and determinants
Project PI: Georgios Kotsakis
Project Summary: The objective of this work is to measure patterns and determinants of frailty globally, in super-regions and at the country level as well as its impact in global health financing.
Donor financing of human resources for health and health worker migration in an aging world
Project PI: Angela Micah
Project Summary: The first pilot objective is to characterize the sources, disbursing agencies, recipients and the types of health workforce-related projects funded by donor countries. Ultimately, the goal is to measure and characterize development assistance for human resources (DAHR). Our second objective is to examine the association and potential impact of development assistance for health (DAH) and DAHR by connecting the movement of health workers out of low and middle-income countries (LMICs) with the flow of DAH and DAHR.
2017–2018 Pilot Awards
Trends in disease burden in Sweden by socioeconomic status: A comparison using the Global Burden of Disease Study
Project PI: Emilie Agardh
Project Summary: The objective of this pilot proposal is to analyze how disease burden varies by different socioeconomic groups over time in Sweden. The pilot seeks to investigate how the total disease burden (fatal and non-fatal) varies by SES and elucidate whether some diseases are more sensitive to socioeconomic inequalities.
Demand for preventive care services and health disparity among Mexico’s vulnerable populations in the era of universal health care
Project PI: Melissa Knox
Project Summary: The project will use data from the Global Burden of Disease project, Mexican health survey data, and machine learning techniques to identify the determinants of demand for the most salient forms of preventive care in Mexico. This research will contribute to a broader set of studies asking whether preventive care services are underutilized in Mexico.
Changes in general and specific mortality in Germany, an analysis by counties and by geographic and socioeconomic disparities 1990-2016: a systematic analysis using Global Burden of Disease Study 2016 data and methods.
Project PI: Ulrich Mueller
Project Summary: The pilot objective is to study the age standardized general mortality and cause-specific mortality rates for the 20 most frequent causes of death in Germany, at the county level, to study geographic and socio-economic disparities in general and specific mortality in developed societies.
Investigation of novel analytic approaches to identifying distinctive patterns of cause-specific mortality and underlying risk factors using county-level data in the United States
Project PI: Andrew Stokes
Project Summary: The overarching objective of this pilot study is to identify distinctive clusters of US counties that share similar patterns across multiple causes of death and examine associations between mortality clusters and underlying risk factors at the county level by leveraging county level risk factor data.
2016–2017 Pilot Awards
Estimating costs, decomposing changes, and forecasting future spending on Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias in the U.S.
Project PI: Joseph Dieleman
Project Summary: This study will develop a reliable source of information on health spending for Alzheimer’s disease (AD), including disentangling spending on AD from spending on comorbidities, generating health expenditure estimates for AD, decomposing the increases in health spending on AD across its major drivers, and will project future US health spending on AD through 2040.
Health expenditures for the elderly in the United States: A feasibility study for estimating county-level total Medicare expenditures by diagnosis.
Project PI: Marcia Weaver
Project Summary: The purpose of the pilot research will be to obtain county-level estimates of Medicare expenditures for the elderly by diagnosis in the United States (US). The long-term goal is to use the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) data to analyze the relationship between health expenditures and disability adjusted life years (DALY) saved among the elderly in the US.
Subnational Burden of Cirrhosis in Mexico. Trends, Risk Factors and Implications for an aging population.
Project PI: Hector Lamadrid-Figueroa
Project Summary: This research will estimate the burden of liver cirrhosis in Mexico through the use of the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) data and by proposing the addition of new sub-national level covariates: specific beverage alcohol consumption (type of alcoholic beverage) and socioeconomic status and genetic ancestry for the 32 states of Mexico.
Exploratory study on solutions to improve health of left-behind elderly with severe mental disorders in rural China.
Project PI: Roman Dong Xu
Project Summary: This proposal will examine the health and care of elderly with severe mental disorders who have been left-behind as their families move to urban settings and will develop and pilot a low‐cost community‐based solution to improve the health of the left‐behind village elderly with schizophrenia in resource‐poor areas.
2015–2016 Pilot Awards
Health disparity in the United Kingdom: distal and intermediate determinants, and their impacts on future mortality.
Project PI: Haidong Wang
Project Summary: This project seeks to leverage new and ongoing work into the subnational burden of disease in the United Kingdom to examine what impact social, economic, and behavioral factors have in these results. We then make scenario-based forecasts utilizing the estimated relationships between aforementioned factors and mortality. The results of this work will be of broad importance and will not only support measures to improve health outcomes in the UK, but will provide international insight into how the US should view its own health challenges. In particular, as the US works to implement some of the strategies that the UK has long provided (e.g., free universal health care access), understanding the factors that impede or facilitate the success of these programs will be critical for our own strategic development and evaluation.
Wealth and health in aging populations: a study of how economic development effects mortality and morbidity in older populations throughout the world.
Project PI: Joseph Dieleman
Project Summary: This project will use measures of mortality and morbidity, disaggregated by age and sex for 188 countries around the world, to identify the effects of economic development on health throughout the life cycle. In addition, it will identify the population subgroups whose health is most susceptible to economic growth and decline. Finally, it will explore how the impact of disability at older ages is related to changes in income as groups approach and enter retirement age. While these results will be presented for all-cause mortality and morbidity, it will set a platform to expand these studies to cause-specific analyses in the future.