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Financing

What we do

  • Support development of a universal health coverage (UHC) health insurance benefit package.
  • Track household income and expenditure to estimate financial risk protection.
  • Engage in strategic purchasing.
  • Support development of national health accounts.

Understanding the details of health spending is necessary to allow countries to improve their systems, ultimately to make them fairer and better serve the people. Health accounts help to protect people from catastrophic health bills and reduce inequalities in health. They are seen as an essential step in making progress towards UHC.

Health system financing is one of the key instruments towards achieving UHC. The WHO country office in the Islamic Republic of Iran is working on a UHC health insurance benefit package, in collaboration with the High Council for Health Insurance by using multi-criteria decision analysis, in close consultation with the Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Center. To date, 2 benefit packages for multiple sclerosis and diabetes mellitus are being revised under the drive to achieve UHC.

The WHO country office works closely with partners on the development of national health accounts to provide details of health spending.

What we have achieved

  • WHO guidelines for analysing household income and expenditure to estimate financial risk protection are being adapted and a training curriculum, developed in collaboration with National Institute for Health Research, has been adapted.
  • Strategic purchasing is another area that the country office is working on with stakeholders to assure its full implementation. Strategic purchasing was rapidly assessed through use of the WHO tool and as a next step governance of strategic purchasing both for system and agency will be assessed. By assessing governance, we are trying to answer whether a country’s existing governance arrangements around the purchasing function are conducive to more strategic purchasing.
  • • A multiple sclerosis universal health coverage benefit package was reviewed/revised using the EDP multi-criteria decision analysis method to select health interventions and procedures to identify insurance coverage, insurance coverage capacity and quality of services. Revisions to the terms of insurance coverage were proposed and the revised package was ratified by the national committee and in the eighty-first session of the High Council for Health Insurance.
  • A national guideline was adapted on analysis of household income and expenditure survey (health expenditures and indicators) and a 3-day workshop curriculum was conducted.

What is next

  • To meet the increasing demands of analysts and policy-makers for health expenditure information, a system of health accounts proposes a framework for the systematic description of the financial flows related to health care. The aim of system is to describe the health care system from an expenditure perspective both for international and national purposes.

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