The Health Innovation Impact Checklist: a tool to improve the development and reporting of impact models for global health innovations

Donor financing is increasingly relying on performance-based measures that demonstrate impact. As new technologies and interventions enter the innovation space to address global health challenges, innovators often need to model their potential impact prior to obtaining solid effectiveness data. Diverse stakeholders rely on impact modeling data to make key funding and scaling decisions. With a lack of standardized methodology to model impact and various stakeholders using different modeling strategies, we propose that a universal innovation impact checklist be used to aid in transparent and aligned modeling efforts. This article describes a new Health Innovation Impact Checklist (HIIC) – a tool developed while evaluating the impact of health innovations funded under the Saving Lives at Birth (SL@B) program. SL@B, a global health Grand Challenge initiative, funded 116 unique maternal and newborn health innovations, four of which were selected for cost-effectiveness analyses (CEAs) within our evaluation. A key data source needed to complete a CEA was the lives saved estimate. HIIC was developed to help validate draft impact models from the SL@B donors and our own team’s additional modeling efforts, to ensure the inclusion of standardized elements and to pressure test assumptions for modeling impact. This article describes the core components of HIIC including its strengths and limitations. It also serves as an open call for further reviewing and tailoring of this checklist for applicability across global efforts to model the impact of health innovations.