Eliminating financial barriers to healthcare
Making healthcare financially accessible is fundamental to improving health outcomes.
In most developing countries, consumers pay out of pocket for more than half of their healthcare costs. Financing healthcare through household payments limits access to quality services and puts patients at financial risk. Governments are challenged to provide universal coverage of healthcare services given limited available resources.
Since 1985, Abt Associates has designed, enhanced, implemented, and evaluated a broad spectrum of healthcare financing reforms. We develop solutions in both the public and private healthcare arenas — enabling countries to improve health sector efficiency, provider performance, service quality, and access for poor and disadvantaged populations.
Key strategies include regulatory reforms, payment mechanisms, including performance-based payment systems, and the introduction of social and community-based health insurance. Our approach to health financing simultaneously emphasizes companion efforts such as financial risk-sharing mechanisms and fee waiver, exemption, and voucher systems, which reduce consumer financial barriers to services.
Our team has developed state-of-the art tools and strategies, such as National Health Accounting and how-to manuals on provider payment systems, based on international best practices and their application in numerous countries.