Dr. Christian Suharlim is a Principal Technical Advisor in Health Economics and Health Technology Assessment (HTA) at MSH. A medical doctor with experience providing PHC in rural Indonesia, Dr. Suharlim has built expertise in health economics, particularly in immunizations. With MSH, he represents USAID in the COVID-19 Vaccine Delivery Partnership working group, which supported alignment among stakeholders such as Gavi, UNICEF, and USAID, and modeled the costs of delivering COVID-19 vaccination programs globally. For USAID’s COVID-19 Task Force, Dr. Suharlim also models resource needs for USAID’s 27 priority countries and leads rapid costing studies in Madagascar and Malawi. He served at the WHO Vaccine Delivery Costing Expert Working Group which developed a consensus statement on vaccine costing methods. He also co-wrote the methodology guide How to Cost Immunization Programs.  

Dr. Suharlim developed and led the ImmunizationEconomics.org platform—an online platform for 2,700 policymakers and researchers hosted at MSH until 2021—by cultivating a partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Harvard and Johns Hopkins Universities, Results for Development, ThinkWell, and John Snow International. Earlier, at Harvard’s Center for Health Decision Sciences, he managed data processes and evaluated the cost, cost-effectiveness, and efficiency of immunization programs for Gates Foundation-funded Expanded Program on Immunization Costing (EPIC) studies in Benin, Ghana, Honduras, Moldova, Uganda, and Zambia, the most extensive study of its kind. Dr. Suharlim also supported the costing and analysis of the Intensified Mission Indradhanush in India, the world’s largest immunization campaign. 

Dr. Suharlim is currently a convener for the Immunization Economics Special Interest Group at the International Health Economics Association. In addition to his work in immunization, Dr. Suharlim served as MSH’s Director of Economic Evaluation for a PHC costing project, where he analyzed PHC spending in Kenya and estimated the normative costs of high-quality PHC, work that has been replicated in Ethiopia, India, and Nigeria. Dr. Suharlim also modeled the costs and benefits of investing in a new schistosomiasis drug in 36 countries for the Pediatric Praziquantel Consortium.  

As the Technical Lead on Pharmaceutical Financing and Resource Allocation to the $169 million USAID-funded Medicines, Technologies, and Pharmaceutical Services (MTaPS) Program, Dr. Suharlim identified facilitators and barriers to HTA introduction and co-wrote the HTA Roadmap to institutionalize HTA in LMICs to help countries set health priorities more transparently, efficiently, and equitably. Dr. Suharlim supports governments in strengthening HTA capacity across the entire lifecycle: from Topic Selection, Assessment, and Appraisal, with a lens of championing participatory decision-making, the use of Real-World Evidence, and the use of Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis. In his focus region of Asia, Dr. Suharlim and coauthors pioneered an analysis to chart countries’ progression and advancement towards eighteen HTA milestones, which empowers countries in various stages of HTA maturity to share insights and learn from one another. Most recently, Dr. Suharlim led a stakeholder engagement exercise in Indonesia, which resulted in a transparent and evidence-informed priority-setting framework, a historic success for the country.  

He received his MD from Universitas Indonesia, an MPH in health policy and management from the Harvard School of Public Health, and his postdoctoral fellowship from the Harvard Center for Health Decision Science.