National Health Accounts

Why do some health systems perform better than others with similar spending pattern? What makes the difference?

These are the questions health policy makers often ask themselves. Having a clear picture of boundaries of a particular health system is a first step toward getting the answer.

The optimum way to evaluate boundaries of some health system is through National Health Accounts (NHA).

National Health Accounts represent a health statistical system designed specifically to assist health policy makers in better understanding and improving performance of their health system.

In order to answer numerous policy related questions, NHA has to be combined with non-financial data from sources such as epidemiological studies, population surveys, and the like. National health accounts assist policy makers to examine the performance of health systems in order to comprehend why systems with similar resource inputs have different health attainments.

In addition to an image of the financial state of the health system, national health accounts can provide information relevant to designing health system policies.

NHA gives answers to following questions:

• How are resources mobilized and managed for the health system?
• Who pays and how much is paid for health care?
• Who provides goods and services, and what resources do they use?
• How are health care funds distributed across the different services, interventions and activities that the health system produces?
• Who benefits from health care expenditure?

ASG can help in the process of NHA creation, namely collection of the relevant health expenditure data from various sources, analysis and interpretation of the results, as well as assist defining sustainable organizational structure which will in future do most of the detailed technical work, as well as interpretation of the results in terms of policy implication. We also facilitate in policy implementation and institutionalization of NHA.