This Initiative Could Generate More Than 18,000 Healthy Life Years and Save Millions of Dollars

In the largest favela in São Paulo, Maria now has convenient access to her annual wellness exams. This wasn't always the case.

Like many Brazilians, the overburdened public healthcare system wasn't meeting her needs, and private care was too expensive.

That is until Maria found dr.consulta, a HealthTech company offering affordable, high-quality care close to home.

For Maria, the benefits of accessible private healthcare are clear: she can stay on top of recommended screenings for her age and address potential issues early.

Beyond these individual benefits, how can we measure the broader societal impacts of improved access to private healthcare?

Healthcare Investments

For impact investors, the answer to this question can help inform decisions about investing in HealthTech companies such as dr.consulta.

In addition to tracking metrics such as the number of patients served or treated for a given disease, estimating broader health outcomes provides a deeper view of an investment's potential impact.

It also allows us to estimate the counterfactual scenario, or the health and economic impacts that could be missed without the investment.

The good news is that we don't have to reinvent the wheel. Borrowing from the global health space, we can apply the widely-accepted DALY metric (Disability-Adjusted Life Years).

DALYs represent the number of healthy life years lost due to premature death or health-related disability.

They are used to measure the burden of diseases for different populations-from diabetes to cancer-and to compare the cost-effectiveness of interventions to treat them.

In other words, better prevention and treatment can result in healthier people and more DALYs averted. DALYs can also be converted into economic impact using annual GDP per capita.

Measuring Impact

IDB Invest estimates the costs and benefits for society of every investment we finance, which in turn factors into our impact rating and decision-making process.

In the case of dr.consulta, our $10 million equity investment is supporting the company's expansion to serve an additional 1.2 million patients in São Paulo over the next seven years.

We used the concept of DALYs to estimate and monetize the potential impact of this expansion in terms of years of healthy life gained by treating more people for particular diseases through dr.consulta.

We took advantage of work already done by the IDB's public sector specialists in Brazil that quantified the DALYs for 23 health interventions associated with preventing or treating different diseases, such as cancer and diabetes, for 2022-2030.

For example, take cervical/uterine cancer. In São Paulo, it affects about 10.5 out of every 100,000 women and is associated with 1,396 years of healthy life lost (DALYs) per million people.

Looking at it another way, by taking action to mitigate and treat this type of cancer among women aged 25-65 -about one-third of the city's 12 million people-, society would gain 1,396 healthy years per million people.

Going back to dr.consulta, about 400,000 of the company's new patients will be women aged 25-65.

By expanding women's access to preventive and treatment services, we estimate that society would gain 368 healthy years. That's like adding a year of healthy life for women to contribute to society each day of the year.

For the 23 health conditions to be treated by dr.consulta, we estimate that our investment's potential depth of impact reaches 18,645 healthy years.

Better Health

Next, we translated these health impacts into economic impacts using annual GDP per capita projections for the state of São Paulo.

After all, poor health is costly, causing people to miss school and work; healthier people are more productive, a plus for economic growth.

Considering all 23 health conditions, our investment in dr.consulta would generate an average societal benefit of approximately US$43 million/year from 2023-2030. This means a total potential benefit of US$301 million.

Even if only half of dr.consulta's new patients receive the interventions needed to become healthier, society would still gain an average of US$22 million annually in improved economic well-being.

Put another way, for every dollar of IDB Invest financing to the company, the return to society would be up to $30 ($15 conservatively) due to a healthier, more productive population.

Intuitively, investing in expanding healthcare to underserved communities is a good thing.

For multilateral development banks, impact investors, and HealthTechs, measuring the impacts on individuals and society is critical for understanding the potential and, ultimately, the effectiveness of these investments.

For more details about this analysis, see our DEBrief, Measuring the Social and Economic Impact of Increased Access to Private Healthcare in Brazil .

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