Institutionalising Health Accounts in Brazil

Health accounts are a vital tool to obtain comprehensive and internationally comparable data on health expenditure and financing which is key information to assess the performance of health systems. After several pilot implementations over the past decade Brazil is now committed to institutionalising the annual production of health accounts at a more granular level. This will unlock the potential of health accounts to better inform health policy decision making. This report reviews efforts to institutionalise health accounts in Brazil aligned with international standards. It analyses the comprehensiveness of reporting the data sources used and methodologies applied to estimate health spending. It also provides recommendations on how to best institutionalise the regular production of health accounts and disseminate the results for greater policy impact and suggests how the current work could be further expanded in the future. Finally the report analyses the first health expenditure data for Brazil generated with this new methodology in comparison to health spending in OECD countries.