Lessons Learned From National Health Accounts in Iran: Highlighted Evidence for Policymakers

Abstract

Context: National Health Account (NHA) is an accepted tool for tracing the flow of health resources at country level. As policy makers concern about the effective allocation of scarce resources, thus NHA can play a dominant role in evidence-based decision making. Reevaluation of last NHA in Iran is required for helpful highlights. Evidence Acquisition: We reviewed last NHA documents in Iran which was performed in 2008 to highlight a good evidence for policy makers and compared it with other national and international available data. Results: Reevaluation of data highlighted some issues, which were compared with the national and international available data and useful evidences for policy makers were extracted. These evidences are mentioned in following part. Conclusions: The issues highlighted in last NHA in Iran were: changes in the health insurance system, adopting approaches for increasing an insurance coverage in noninsured population, informing the population about insurance scheme, private insurance scheme according to indigenous conditions, applying a concerted national effort towards controlling the high cost of medicine alongside concerning about equity and coverage, and applying effective indigenous strategies for decreasing out-of-pocket health care expenditures.