OBJECTIVES: Funding for health care programs competes with funding for professional education (ie, implementation of health care programs) and funding for research to reduce uncertainty around program cost-effectiveness. No study has yet shown how to allocate a combined budget for health care, professional education, and research. Previous work did not consider the fundamental idea that interventions with an acceptable incremental cost-effectiveness ratio (ICER) for an adoption decision may not be acceptable any more once implementation decisions are made simultaneously. Furthermore, previous work did not consider that cost-effectiveness of research is conditional upon the programs chosen for adoption and implementation. The purpose of this work is to present a sequential process to allocate a combined budget with the goal to maximize health. METHODS: Development of a 3-step allocation process to maximize health based on a single budget for health care, professional education, and research RESULTS: As a first step, a league table approach determines which programs would be funded if the combined budget were spent just on adoption. The second step analytically determines a new (lower) threshold ICER which maximizes health by discontinuing programs above the new threshold and investing in implementing programs below the threshold. The third step considers cost-effectiveness of research to reduce uncertainty around program cost-effectiveness. In order to fund this research, the threshold ICER for adoption plus implementation has to be reduced further. In order to maximize health, ICERs of research studies need to equal the newly defined threshold ICER for adoption plus implementation. CONCLUSIONS: A 3-step allocation process is able to maximize health based on a single budget for health care, professional education, and research. Compared to a programming approach the proposed approach yields a closed-form analytical solution and is able to consider that research decisions are conditional upon adoption and implementation choices.