This brief describes opportunities to improve financial protection programs using behavior change approaches. The Practice Spotlights Social and Behavior Change series supports USAID’s Vision for Health System Strengthening 2030 by exploring how social and behavior change approaches can contribute to countries’ health system strengthening efforts.

The 8th Global Symposium on Health Systems Research (HSR 2024) will be held in Nagasaki, Japan, from November 18 to 22, 2024.

LHSS partnered with colleagues working as part of the USAID MTaPS project to document a practical approach that countries can use to track pharmaceutical expenditure (PE) using the System of Health Accounts (SHA) 2011 framework. This resource contributes to efforts by the World Health Organization to develop global guidance on tracking of PE.

This brief focuses on how pooling arrangements—the way countries combine funding from different sources to spread the financial risk of needing to pay for health services—can be improved to accelerate progress toward UHC.

LHSS is presenting at the Global Digital Health Forum, December 4-6, 2023, in Washington, DC.

LHSS presents on health budget execution at the Montreux Collaborative on Fiscal Space, Public Financial Management and Health Financing, November 13-17, 2023.

LHSS along with speakers from USAID and WHO reflected on strategies to ensure reliable funding for costing the planning, design, implementation, and evaluation of a National Quality Policy and Strategy (NQPS).

This brief includes a global evidence review of DFS for health conducted by LHSS and an analysis of two programmatic case studies of DFS for health by Management Sciences for Health (MSH) through the Digital Square initiative.

This learning brief can be used as a resource for HRH managers, planners, program managers, and frontline practitioners to learn how other countries are approaching and successfully designing and implementing solutions to their HRH challenges. It can also be used as a reference for health policy makers, funders, and implementing partners to inform the design and implementation of HRH resource optimization initiatives covered in this brief.

This Catalog allows practitioners to consider which interventions have more robust evidence bases to support their practical application, such as: enhancing worker and supervisor competencies through training, offering nonfinancial incentives for high performers, practicing task sharing to promote cost savings, implementing digital solutions to expand access to services, and reducing costs of procuring and distributing pharmaceutical products.

To advance progress toward universal health coverage, agreed-upon health priorities need to be reflected in national plans and budgets. This blog offers key lessons for ministries of health seeking to make that happen.

The 15th IHEA World Congress on Health Economics will be held at the Cape Town International Convention Centre from July 8-12, 2023

This learning resource presents key learning from the activity literature review, learning exchange meetings, and TA workshops. This resource focuses particularly on stakeholder engagement and institutionalizing stronger links between national health priorities, sector plans and national budgets, which learning partners identified as their most pressing issues.

Routine stakeholder engagement is critical to fair and inclusive national priority setting for health, but many countries face challenges in ​​reaching key groups. This blog shares promising practices for bringing in key stakeholders and making sure the loudest voices aren’t the only ones heard.

​​​For countries wanting to strengthen health budget execution, learning about promising approaches used by others is one thing but putting them into practice is another. This blog reveals how two countries, Lao PDR and Peru, adapted promising practices and began to implement them.