Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development

OECD Health Data 2017 offers the most comprehensive source of comparable statistics on health and health systems across OECD countries. It is an essential tool for health researchers and policy advisors in governments, the private sector and the academic community, to carry out comparative analyses and draw lessons from international comparisons of diverse health care systems.B1:B4

OECD Health Data 2017 offers the most comprehensive source of comparable statistics on health and health systems across OECD countries. It is an essential tool for health researchers and policy advisors in governments, the private sector and the academic community, to carry out comparative analyses and draw lessons from international comparisons of diverse health care systems.

A System of Health Accounts 2011 provides an updated and systematic description of the financial flows related to the consumption of health care goods and services. As demands for information increase and more countries implement and institutionalise health accounts according to the system, the data produced are expected to be more comparable, more detailed and more policy relevant. It builds on the original OECD Manual, published in 2000 to create a single global framework for producing health expenditure accounts that can help track resource flows from sources to uses. It is the result of a collaborative effort between the OECD, WHO and the European Commission, and sets out in more detail the boundaries, the definitions and the concepts – responding to health care systems around the globe – from the simplest to the more complicated. The accounting framework is organised around a tri-axial system for the recording of health care expenditure, namely classifications of the functions of health care (ICHA-HC), health care provision (ICHA-HP), and financing schemes (ICHA-HF).

A key set of information for policy analysis is i) how much revenue is collected; ii) in what ways is it collected; iii) from which institutional units of the economy are revenues raised for each particular financing scheme; and iv) which financing schemes receive those revenues. This dataset provides information about the contribution mechanisms the particular financing schemes use to raise their revenues. Understanding the nature of the flows is of importance from the perspective of both health and public finance policy. For example, the classification of revenues make it possible to distinguish between public and private funding of health care finance. Understanding how resources are raised by financing schemes is important for many countries, as many health systems are struggling with the issue of funding. The classification of revenues of financing schemes is suitable for tracking the collection mechanisms of a financing framework. Furthermore, the new classification makes it possible to analyse the contribution of the institutional units to health financing.