3 May 2017 – Egypt has identified social health insurance as its way to achieve universal health coverage. This new health system reform will entail making important decisions on, among other things, how to purchase services, pay providers and set prices for these services. For this to be realized, policy-makers, purchasers and providers need to access routine cost information to allow them to perform their planning, purchasing and managing functions. In Egypt, as in many countries, health financing and reporting systems have not generated the data or expertise needed to use many of the well-established costing methodologies available.
WHO, in collaboration with the Ministry of Health and Population, Health Insurance Organization, Supreme University Council and the private sector, has recently completed a costing study on secondary and tertiary care hospitals, which provided a set of accurate indicative cost information data to be used as a basis to inform decisions on pricing and provider payment mechanisms.
Throughout the study, the WHO team, in collaboration with international consultants from the Joint Learning Network, provided training and capacity-building to help develop a critical mass of Egyptian experts able to further update and expand costing work.
The study started in May 2016 and its final results were released in April 2017.
This costing exercise was a foundational step providing indicative benchmarks to inform future price setting and the provider payment system for social health insurance in Egypt. It was an important benchmark in the institutionalization of costing work that will support decision-making and planning by policy-makers, purchasers and providers.