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.

This two-pager focuses on USAID’s Learning Question 6, "What are key behavioral outcomes that indicate a functioning, integrated health system? In what ways can integrated health system strengthening approaches explicitly include social and behavior change?"

This two-pager focuses on USAID’s Learning Question 4, “What are effective and sustainable mechanisms or processes to integrate local, community, sub-national, national, and regional voices, priorities, and contributions into USAID’s health system strengthening efforts?”

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

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 brief highlights the recent shifts in health systems practice toward more explicitly incorporating an SBC lens in social accountability activities that aim to improve overall health system performance and address inequities. The brief synthesizes the growing body of evidence on the role social accountability plays in increasing accessibility to better-quality health care services and uses case studies and lessons learned to highlight how SBC approaches can be more explicitly integrated into this aspect of HSS programming.

This brief builds on the USAID Local Health System Sustainability Project (LHSS) Strengthening Governance report (2022) and global National Quality Policy and Strategy (NQPS) survey, aiming to provide practical examples and considerations for country practitioners to consider on their quality journeys. It includes case studies of three countries that have used NQPS to mobilize and align resources for quality.

In this webinar, we discuss conditions that facilitate the institutionalization of practices that improve health system outcomes. 

This two-pager focuses on USAID’s Learning Question 1, “What are the contributions of systems thinking approaches and tools to changes in health system outcomes? How do systems thinking approaches affect health system outcomes?”

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.

This two-pager focuses on USAID’s Learning Question 5, “What are effective and sustainable mechanisms or processes that enable the participation of private sector, civil society, and public organizations in developing locally-led solutions to improve high-performing health care, especially for poor and vulnerable populations? What enables the effective participation or leadership of marginalized populations themselves in the development and implementation of these solutions? Under what conditions is this participation different?”

During this webinar, we use the HSS Evidence Gap Map to explore measurement tools and approaches that have been used to estimate impact of HSS interventions on health systems outcomes.

The Evidence Gap Map identifies existing literature examining the impact of health systems strengthening on health outcomes. Evidence is organized around USAID's Health System Strengthening Learning Agenda.