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Donald A. Barr, PhD, MD

Donald A. Barr is with the Department of Sociology, Stanford University, Stanford, Calif.

Correspondence: Requests for reprints should be sent to Department of Sociology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305–2047 (e-mail: barr{at}stanford.edu).

Public–private partnerships have become a common approach to health care problems worldwide. Many public–private partnerships were created during the late 1990s, but most were focused on specific diseases such as HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria.

Recently there has been enthusiasm for using public–private partnerships to improve the delivery of health and welfare services for a wider range of health problems, especially in developing countries. The success of public–private partnerships in this context appears to be mixed, and few data are available to evaluate their effectiveness.

This analysis provides an overview of the history of health-related public–private partnerships during the past 20 years and describes a research protocol commissioned by the World Health Organization to evaluate the effectiveness of public–private partnerships in a research context.