Provides information and analysis on such topics as, new and emerging health-related technologies, long-term care, private health insurance, health-care cost control, equity of access across income groups, health workforce planning and productivity, and waiting times for elective surgery.

Health at a Glance provides a comprehensive set of indicators on population health and health system performance across OECD members and key emerging economies. This edition has a special focus on the health impact of COVID-19 in OECD countries, including deaths and illness caused by the virus, adverse effects on access and quality of care, and the growing burden of mental ill-health.

This series of seven policy studies cover lessons from experience in health system reform, improving the technical quality of health care, income-related inequality in health care, matching supply with demand for physicians and nurses, excessive waiting times, private health insurance, and more.

This volume, developed by the Observatory together with OECD, provides an overall conceptual framework for understanding and applying strategies aimed at improving quality of care. Crucially, it summarizes available evidence on different quality strategies and provides recommendations for their implementation. This book is intended to help policy-makers to understand concepts of quality and to support them to evaluate single strategies and combinations of strategies.

In 2015, building on the advances of the Millennium Development Goals, the United Nations adopted Sustainable Development Goals that include an explicit commitment to achieve universal health coverage by 2030. However, enormous gaps remain between what is achievable in human health and where global health stands today, and progress has been both incomplete and unevenly distributed. In order to meet this goal, a deliberate and comprehensive effort is needed to improve the quality of health care services globally. Crossing the Global Quality Chasm: Improving Health Care Worldwide focuses on one particular shortfall in health care affecting global populations: defects in the quality of care. This study reviews the available evidence on the quality of care worldwide and makes recommendations to improve health care quality globally while expanding access to preventive and therapeutic services, with a focus in low-resource areas. Crossing the Global Quality Chasm emphasizes the organization and delivery of safe and effective care at the patient/provider interface. This study explores issues of access to services and commodities, effectiveness, safety, efficiency, and equity. Focusing on front line service delivery that can directly impact health outcomes for individuals and populations, this book will be an essential guide for key stakeholders, governments, donors, health systems, and others involved in health care.

The health systems we enjoy today, and expected medical advances in the future, will be difficult to finance from public resources without major reforms. Public health spending in OECD countries has grown rapidly over most of the last half century. These spending increases have contributed to ...

International comparison of health system performance has become increasingly popular, made possible by the rapidly expanding availability of health data. It has become one of the most important levers for prompting health system reform. Yet, as the demand for transparency and accountability in healthcare increases, so too does the need to compare data from different health systems both accurately and meaningfully. This timely and authoritative book offers an important summary of the current developments in health system performance comparison. It summarises the current state of efforts to compare systems, and identifies and explores the practical and conceptual challenges that occur. It discusses data and methodological challenges, as well as broader issues such as the interface between evidence and practice. The book draws out the priorities for future work on performance comparison, in the development of data sources and measurement instruments, analytic methodology, and assessment of evidence on performance. It concludes by presenting the key lessons and future priorities, and in doing so offers a rich source of material for policy-makers, their analytic advisors, international agencies, academics and students of health systems.