World Health Partners (WHP) is launching a large social franchising program of healthcare delivery in Bihar, India, with funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The WHP project is particularly innovative in integrating a social franchising delivery model with a telemedicine platform. Although social franchising models of delivery are becoming increasingly common, to our knowledge, none of these efforts has been rigorously evaluated.

COHESIVE-India is conducting an evaluation of the foundation-financed WHP project.  The overarching focus of the evaluation project (called Bihar Evaluation of Social Franchising and Telemedicine (BEST)) is to provide experimental evidence on how the WHP model influences outcomes related to four target diseases of interest to the foundation: childhood diarrhea, childhood pneumonia, tuberculosis (TB), and visceral leishmaniasis (VL).  The evaluation has been designed to estimate the causal impact of the WHP program on the foundation’s target disease outcomes as well as other indicators of its primary health care success. The evaluation is a prospective randomized evaluation that relies on the franchisee network model of the WHP program, which naturally lends itself to a cluster randomization design.