Health Accounts

Studies | Publications | Related work

Information on health systems financing and resource use are an essential input for better health policy and health systems design. Health accounts has emerged as the main method for tracking and presenting national health expenditure data, with important developments being the introduction of the OECD System of Health Accounts (SHA) as a quasi-global statistical standard, and the support by WHO for HA development in all countries.

IHP is a global leader in the development of the health accounts field. In Sri Lanka, IHP Fellow, Dr Rannan-Eliya established the first health accounts system in the country, and now IHP maintains a permanent effort to constantly update its Sri Lanka Health Accounts (SLHA) as a monitor of expenditure trends in the country. Regionally, IHP is the coordinator of the Asia-Pacific NHA Network (APNHAN), and through APNHAN collaborates closely with the OECD's new regional centre in Korea, the RCHSP, in development of the health accounts field in the region. IHP and IHP experts also support many countries around the world in development of health accounts systems and standards.

Current research programme

IHP's current work in health accounts is focused in three key areas: (i) updating and further development of IHP's Sri Lanka Health Accounts system, which are fully compatible with the latest OECD SHA standards, (ii) collaboration at the regional level and with OECD and WHO to improve the coverage and quality of available national health accounts statistics, (iii) methodological work to develop disease-specific accounts, and other subaccounts such as for HIV/AIDS.

Our current research includes:

Collaboration with the OECD RCHSP to describe and document the first SHA implementations in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Mongolia and other regional countries.
Development of a pilot to show the feasibility of extending SHA-based health accounts to fully describe the distribution of expenditures by disease, with initial application to Sri Lanka. more >>
Collaboration with partners in the APNHAN network and OECD RCHSP to systematically profile and compare health expenditures in different countries of the Asia-Pacific region, based on the first SHA implementations.
Technical support for the development and upgrading of health accounts systems in Bangladesh, Malaysia, Hong Kong SAR and Palestine.
Collaboration with regional colleagues in reviewing and providing inputs for the revision of the OECD SHA system.