Final technical report. Cost Analysis of Reproductive Health Services Provided by the Ministry of Health Guatemala.

To improve integration of reproductive health service provision at the Ministrys health centers and posts the Ministry of Health in Guatemala and INOPAL III initiated an operations research project that tested a job aid to help service providers in screening their clients need for reproductive health services. Under the improved service provision model clients received more services per consultation as compared to the traditional single-service consultation model. This study compared the costs and cost-effectiveness of providing multiple services during each consultation with that of single service consultation in order to determine if integration of services reduces costs per consultation. The results confirmed the hypotheses that costs are smaller under an integrated service provision model than the vertical system. This finding was especially true of family planning prenatal and well child consultations. Integration of services is cost-effective under an integrated model because more services are provided per consultation at the same cost. Estimations showed that cost of client per visit was similar among experimental and control sites. The three economic benefits of integrated service provision are: 1) average cost per service are smaller; 2) use of consultation time is more efficient; and 3) clients avoid duplication of costs of repeated visits and received more services per visit.