Health Accounts Production Tool

It provides health expenditure information to policymakers and stakeholders in ways that can be clearly and directly linked to a country's health financing concerns and health system performance. The HA framework has been accepted as a critical policy tool in many countries. However, the complexity of the HA methodology has been an important deterrent to routine, consistent, and low-cost production of HA estimates. Many low-income countries have come to rely heavily on foreign technical assistance to implement HAs. Documentation of the methods remains poor and estimation techniques vary from year to year, compromising the comparability of results over time. These challenges have prevented countries from successfully institutionalizing HA, or routinely producing and using high-quality HA data for decision-making. The HA Production Tool is a software application that lessens the complexity of the HA exercise by providing step-by-step guidance to in-country teams, reducing the need for technical assistance and increasing local capacity for HA production. The current HA Production Tool represents the second iteration of the software, developed jointly by USAID's Health Finance and Governance project and the World Health Organization, with input and support from country HA teams. The HA Production Tool provides core classifications as developed by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) System of Health Accounts (SHA 2011). Additionally, local teams can create country-specific codes to be used in their HA. The tool features a built-in validation function to facilitate review and correction for double-counting, an interactive flow diagram to help HA teams visualize and analyze funding flows, and an option to apply weighting to survey data from NGOs, employers, and insurance companies to improve the precision of expenditure estimates. The HA Production Tool also streamlines data collection and data analysis through a survey creator and import function, and automatically generates HA output tables after analysis is complete, eliminating the time-consuming step of manual table generation. The tool guides country teams through the HA estimation process with step-by-step directions, and provides a platform to manage large datasets, reducing the burden of editing, sharing, and keeping track of multiple disparate files of expenditure data. The tool also allows for multi-user functionality, customization and storage of HA codes, and storage of past HA estimations, facilitating collaboration, consistency, and flexibility in the HA estimation process.