The main purpose of this project was to support the WHO Barcelona Office in filling the gaps in data on health expenditure for the Regional report. In particular, the CGC team was expected to track missing data on health spending and improve data quality in three countries of the WHO European Region (Albania, Montenegro and Ukraine) in November-December 2020, in order to enrich the Regional report to be completed by the end of 2020.
Under objective 1 “Track the missing health expenditure data based on the international methodology for time-series identified by WHO (within the framework of Global Health Expenditure Database/GHED)” the CGC was required to:
A) Study the countries’ health systems and financing mechanisms to ensure reforms and historical changes are reflected in time series if needed with a focus on Albania and Ukraine:
- Map and document the existing flows of funds as a part of the health financing system applying international methodology (FS, HF, FA);
- Map and document the current information flows in the health system (financial and medical/operational statistics) as practised routinely for tracking health expenditures on the regular base;
- Define potential gaps in the data collection practices for tracking health expenditures and elaborate possible solutions for addressing the gaps in data collection and for the improvement of data collection practices.
B) Track and estimate the missing health expenditure data based on the international methodology together with the local health expenditure teams;
Under Objective 2 “Improve the quality of health expenditure data collection based on international methodology under WHO guidance” the CGC team was required to:
- Check and validate the quality of data, correct all errors and provide explanations where needed, including documenting significant differences between old and new international methodologies.
- Revise and re-estimate the time series for the Global Health Expenditure Database based on data quality check;
- Review the country metadata and notes, as needed, to help explain any large changes with previously published information;
- Review the relevance and accuracy of out-of-pocket spending (OOPs) estimates published in GHED:
- Study and document the existing methodology of OOPs estimation under this tracking exercise analysis;
- Estimate different OOPs estimation scenarios by applying the methodology recommended by the relevant teams of WHO and provide these estimations to WHO.