Resource Type: Report
Authors: Christopher Cintron, Victor Mudhune, Romana Haider, Heather Cogswell, Jose Gutierrez, Frank Angira, and Carlos Avila
Published: April 2017

Resource Description:

Kenya’s current HIV care guidelines call for universal coverage of routine viral load (VL) monitoring for people receiving antiretroviral therapy and early infant diagnosis (EID) testing for all children born to women with HIV. Universal coverage, essential to reaching UNAIDS 90-90-90 targets and ending the AIDS epidemic, will incur significant costs given Kenya’s large number of people living with HIV (PLWH) of 1.5 million. To support the Kenya Ministry of Health (MOH) and Kenya Medical Research Institute (KEMRI), this USAID-funded Health Finance and Governance project (HFG) study estimates comprehensive and component-specific unit costs of HIV VL and EID testing in Kenya using a centralized laboratory network, and reports on network utilization and outputs. It also estimates HIV VL and EID testing unit costs under a range of scenarios for two point-of-care (POC) diagnostic platforms being considered for deployment by the Ministry and partners.

The purpose of this study is to estimate unit costs of adult viral load (VL) and early infant diagnosis (EID) testing in the Nyanza region of Western Kenya. We also estimate unit costs for point-of-care (POC) VL and EID testing, and describe the central lab-based testing network structure and utilization.