Under the general umbrella of social health insurance (SHI) reform in Egypt, WHO country office-Egypt is
currently conducting a costing study in collaboration with; the Ministry of Health and Population; Health Insurance Organization-HIO; the University hospitals’ council and the private sector. This costing study aims at providing baseline information for setting provider payments and prices for future SHI reimbursements.
From 18 to 26 September, the WHO country office in Egypt, in coordination with team of consultants from the Joint Learning Network (JLN) costing collaborative, have conducted a training of the trainers workshop based on international lessons gained from similar costing activities. This workshop acts as an intensive training course on costing for provider payments, as through the study process the aim is to train a technical team of Egyptian experts in order to expand and produce, in a continuous manner, costing studies for the purpose of SHI development.
Data collection step, performed by the trained technical team and supported by WHO country office team, is currently underway in the hospitals participating in the study. This will be followed by initial analysis of the results to be then disseminated to the steering committee, overseeing the study process, for further interpretation of the findings and to make policy recommendations.
This costing activity is considered as the foundational step in a long-term process to produce continuous cost data through unified standard method of costing that can be used in determining; the cost structure, the pricing system and designing future payment mechanisms.