Techniques to manage scarce healthcare resources continue to evolve in response to changing, growing and competing demands. Yet there is no standard definition in the priority setting literature of what might constitute the desired impact or success of resource management activities.

Purpose – Program budgeting and marginal analysis (PBMA) is a priority setting approach that assists decision makers with allocating resources. Previous PBMA work establishes its efficacy and indicates that contextual factors complicate priority setting, which can hamper PBMA effectiveness....