Since 2011, the IDB has consolidated a knowledge network, CRITERIA, to support Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) countries. Today, we have more than 2,400 members, including policy and decision-makers, academics, health sector technicians, and citizens interested in how governments can improve decision-making processes about what to finance in health and at what price.

Through explicit priority setting in health and drug price intervention strategies, we aim to support informed decision making about what health services and technologies to finance with the available public funds and how much to pay for them. This has the ultimate goal of supporting countries progress towards Universal Health Coverage by reaching higher levels of health for the population with the existing resources.

In order to do this, we combine two strategies:

1. The provision of tailor-made technical assistance to governments of the LAC region and the creation of spaces for dialogue through workshops, seminars, and activities that promote the exchange of knowledge.
2. The generation and dissemination of applied knowledge through webinars, policy documents, technical documents, and books, as well as a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on “What to finance in health and at what price?”, which will be released shortly.

For more than a decade, a multidisciplinary team of experts in health policy has supported the countries of the region in Health Technology Assessment (HTA), Health Benefit Plans (HBP), pharmaceutical policy, drug and medical devices regulation, catastrophic funds, and horizon scanning, among others. This work has been possible thanks to the support of a growing network of high-level specialists with extensive international experience in the academic and institutional fields.

The strategies that we have implemented have allowed us to establish ourselves as international leaders in issues of explicit priority setting in health and drug price intervention strategies.