↓ Skip to main content

Assessing the burden of medical impoverishment by cause: a systematic breakdown by disease in Ethiopia

Overview of attention for article published in BMC Medicine, October 2016
Altmetric Badge

About this Attention Score

  • In the top 25% of all research outputs scored by Altmetric
  • High Attention Score compared to outputs of the same age (85th percentile)
  • Average Attention Score compared to outputs of the same age and source

Mentioned by

blogs
1 blog
twitter
4 X users

Citations

dimensions_citation
31 Dimensions

Readers on

mendeley
163 Mendeley
You are seeing a free-to-access but limited selection of the activity Altmetric has collected about this research output. Click here to find out more.
Title
Assessing the burden of medical impoverishment by cause: a systematic breakdown by disease in Ethiopia
Published in
BMC Medicine, October 2016
DOI 10.1186/s12916-016-0697-0
Pubmed ID
Authors

Stéphane Verguet, Solomon Tessema Memirie, Ole Frithjof Norheim

Abstract

Out-of-pocket (OOP) medical expenses often lead to catastrophic expenditure and impoverishment in low- and middle-income countries. Yet, there has been no systematic examination of which specific diseases and conditions (e.g., tuberculosis, cardiovascular disease) drive medical impoverishment, defined as OOP direct medical costs pushing households into poverty. We used a cost and epidemiological model to propose an assessment of the burden of medical impoverishment in Ethiopia, i.e., the number of households crossing a poverty line due to excessive OOP direct medical expenses. We utilized disease-specific mortality estimates from the Global Burden of Disease study, epidemiological and cost inputs from surveys, and secondary data from the literature to produce a count of poverty cases due to OOP direct medical costs per specific condition. In Ethiopia, in 2013, and among 20 leading causes of mortality, we estimated the burden of impoverishment due to OOP direct medical costs to be of about 350,000 poverty cases. The top three causes of medical impoverishment were diarrhea, lower respiratory infections, and road injury, accounting for 75 % of all poverty cases. We present a preliminary attempt for the estimation of the burden of medical impoverishment by cause for high mortality conditions. In Ethiopia, medical impoverishment was notably associated with illness occurrence and health services utilization. Although currently used estimates are sensitive to health services utilization, a systematic breakdown of impoverishment due to OOP direct medical costs by cause can provide important information for the promotion of financial risk protection and equity, and subsequent design of health policies toward universal health coverage, reduction of direct OOP payments, and poverty alleviation.

X Demographics

X Demographics

The data shown below were collected from the profiles of 4 X users who shared this research output. Click here to find out more about how the information was compiled.
Mendeley readers

Mendeley readers

The data shown below were compiled from readership statistics for 163 Mendeley readers of this research output. Click here to see the associated Mendeley record.

Geographical breakdown

Country Count As %
Unknown 163 100%

Demographic breakdown

Readers by professional status Count As %
Student > Master 42 26%
Researcher 16 10%
Student > Ph. D. Student 16 10%
Student > Postgraduate 8 5%
Student > Doctoral Student 5 3%
Other 28 17%
Unknown 48 29%
Readers by discipline Count As %
Medicine and Dentistry 33 20%
Nursing and Health Professions 25 15%
Economics, Econometrics and Finance 16 10%
Social Sciences 10 6%
Decision Sciences 4 2%
Other 20 12%
Unknown 55 34%
Attention Score in Context

Attention Score in Context

This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 12. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 30 April 2018.
All research outputs
#2,588,548
of 22,896,955 outputs
Outputs from BMC Medicine
#1,613
of 3,443 outputs
Outputs of similar age
#46,449
of 316,331 outputs
Outputs of similar age from BMC Medicine
#37
of 70 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 22,896,955 research outputs across all sources so far. Compared to these this one has done well and is in the 88th percentile: it's in the top 25% of all research outputs ever tracked by Altmetric.
So far Altmetric has tracked 3,443 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a lot more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 43.6. This one has gotten more attention than average, scoring higher than 53% of its peers.
Older research outputs will score higher simply because they've had more time to accumulate mentions. To account for age we can compare this Altmetric Attention Score to the 316,331 tracked outputs that were published within six weeks on either side of this one in any source. This one has done well, scoring higher than 85% of its contemporaries.
We're also able to compare this research output to 70 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one is in the 47th percentile – i.e., 47% of its contemporaries scored the same or lower than it.