An important United Nations sustainable development goal target for health aims is to achieve universal health coverage (UHC), including financial risk protection, access to quality essential health-care services and access to safe, effective, quality and affordable essential medicines and vaccines for all. Significant resources have been invested to track progress of countries toward achievement of this goal; however these efforts disproportionately focus on tracking implementation and outcome metrics without sufficient attention to the policy environment needed to achieve success.

This project team developed a publicly available centralized source of UHC financing policies and laws for low- and middle-income countries. Using a policy surveillance approach, the project team conducted a systematic identification, collection, coding and analysis of laws and policies that influence financing for UHC in each country. Team members also created an interactive data visualization dashboard of these policies and produced a report on the evolution of UHC financing policies.

Learn more about this project team by viewing their lightning talk at the 2022 Fortin Foundation Bass Connections Showcase.

Timing

Summer 2021 – Summer 2022

Team Outputs

Interactive web application and data visualization dashboard

Policy Surveillance of Financing for Universal Health Coverage (Katie Thomas and Shawin Vitsupakorn, lightning talk at Fortin Foundation Bass Connections Showcase, Duke University, April 13, 2022)

See related team, Policy Surveillance of Universal Health Coverage Financing in Developing Countries (2022-2023), and Data+ summer project, Policy Surveillance of UHC Financing in Developing Countries (2022).

Image: Universal Health Coverage Day 2020, by Trinity Care Foundation, licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0