As health systems evolve to respond to changing demographics, disease characteristics and complex financing mechanisms, governments are increasingly being asked to provide transparent and accurate data on how much is spent on health. WHO/Europe is now urging countries to use the International System of Health Accounts (SHA) jointly developed by WHO, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and Eurostat to address this specific need.
When countries are able to accurately track health expenditure data, they can assess their health resources, the efficiency and effectiveness of resource allocation, and the equity of health care delivery. It can also help track progress toward important goals, such as universal health coverage.
The SHA is a framework that helps countries improve their understanding of how health-related spending is used. For example, it can help identify who benefits from the spending, the purpose for which it is used (what diseases or conditions), the type of care provided (prevention, outpatient or inpatient care) and the sources of funding as well as the patterns of funding.
Over the past six years, interest in using SHA to track health spending has increased among countries in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and the Western Balkans. WHO responds to this demand by providing technical support to countries to develop and produce evidence and use it in policymaking.
Tracking Healthcare Expenses Using SHA
WHO/Europe recently organized a joint workshop for health policy makers and financing experts from 16 countries in Eastern Europe, Central Asia and the Western Balkans, encouraging governments to move to a new phase of monitoring health expenditure.
Held in Istanbul, the “5th European Sub-Regional Meeting on Health Expenditure Tracking Using SHA” saw a renewed commitment to better and more transparent data on health expenditure in this group of country.
“Health accounts data provide a comprehensive and internationally comparable overview of health spending in countries in the WHO European Region, providing valuable information for policy makers to make informed decisions” , said Dr Tamás Evetovits, head of the WHO Health Systems Office in Barcelona. Financing, the leading WHO/Europe office in this field of activity. The results produced by standardizing data reporting based on the SHA methodology are published in the widely used Global Health Expenditure Database (GHED), making them easily accessible to researchers, policy makers and researchers. other stakeholders so that they can develop evidence-based policies and strategic planning.
A key factor linked to the SHA methodology is the need to regularly present health accounts data and develop tailored reports providing an overview of a country’s health system. This in turn helps address public health priorities such as strengthening primary health care and mental health services, and informing direct spending on medicines.
“To increase the relevance and usefulness of health accounts at the national level, Member States are encouraged to focus their monitoring of health expenditure reporting on the most relevant policy issues in their country’s specific context. In addition to the personalized support provided by WHO, countries benefit from comparative analytical reports on the most pressing health system issues at the regional level, produced by our office based on health accounts data,” added Baktygul Akkazieva, technical manager at the WHO Barcelona Office for Health. Financing health systems.
