Funding Innovative Healthcare Programs Through Social Impact Bonds: Issues and Challenges

Abstract

Social Impact Bonds (SIBs) have quickly attracted the attention of policy makers, practitioners, and academics due to their ability to fund innovative health and social programs while generating savings for governments and financial returns for investors. Health Impact Bonds (HIBs) represent the adaptation of these current examples of Social Impact Bonds in recidivism and child removal into new health programs and interventions that encourage investments in cost-saving preventive services in order to reduce the need for more costly remediation and fill the market gap between the private and public sectors. This work provides an overview of this emerging funding scheme and proposes reflections and suggestions useful for both practitioners and policy makers. Thus, the first part of the work presents an overview of the literature about SIBs and HIBs by highlighting the opportunities and challenges related to their implementation, the second part provides qualitative and quantitative data on all the existing HIBs, and the last part provides a discussion and suggestions useful for their implementation.