Stefan Kohler¹ (with Norman Sitali² and Nicolas Paul³)

1 University of Heidelberg

2 MSF

3 Charité Berlin

Import of medical supplies is common but the import costs of health programs and specific imported medical supplies remains largely unexplored. Limited knowledge about import costs and their structure introduces uncertainty to budget planning, cost management and cost-effectiveness analysis of health programs. We used cost accounting to estimate, firstly, the average import costs of a tuberculosis (TB) program in Uzbekistan, secondly, the import costs of individual medical supply items and, thirdly, the cost that drug import added to cost of a TB drug regimen.