The Health Accounts (HA) framework is an internationally standardized methodology for measuring financial resource flows in the health sector. 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.

While HA has been accepted as a critical policy tool in many countries, challenges have prevented countries from successfully institutionalizing HA (i.e. routinely producing and using high quality data for decision-making). The complexity of the methodology has deterred routine, consistent, and low-cost estimates and many low-income countries rely heavily on foreign technical assistance to implement HAs. Moreover, documentation of the methods remains poor and estimation techniques vary from year to year, compromising the comparability of results over time.

In response to these challenges, USAID’s HFG (and predecessor HS20/20) project, in collaboration with WHO, developed the Health Accounts Production Tool (HAPT). The HAPT is a software application that provides step-by-step guidance to in-country teams conducting a HA exercise, and has the potential to boost local capacity of HA production and incrementally reduce reliance on technical assistance. A new HFG brief describes the software in more detail.

Health Accounts Production Tool