Resource Type: Brief, Tool
Authors: Douglas Glandon
Published: 5/1/2012

Resource Description:

The National Health Accounts (NHA) framework is an internationally standardized methodology for measuring financial resource flows in the health sector. NHA is designed to provide health expenditure information to policy makers and stakeholders in ways that can be clearly and directly linked to a country’s health financing concerns and health system performance; therefore, it has been accepted as a critical policy tool in many countries. However, the complexity of the NHA methodology has been an important deterrent to routine, consistent, and low-cost production of NHA estimates. Many low-income countries have come to rely heavily on foreign technical assistance to implement NHAs. Documentation of the methods remains poor and estimation techniques vary from year to year, compromising the comparability of NHA results over time. Together, these challenges have prevented countries from successfully institutionalizing NHA (i.e. routinely producing and using high quality NHA data). The NHA Production Tool lessens the complexity of the NHA exercise by providing step-by-step guidance to in-country NHA teams, thereby reducing the need for technical assistance and increasing local capacity for NHA production.