Coronavirus disease 2019

Summary. This document is destined to the countries' teams in charge of the elaboration of health accounts studies and provides methodological guidance to ...

As an alternative to HAPT, WHO Member states can use the WHO Health Accounts Questionnaire (HAQ) to report COVID-19 memorandum items by financing scheme (HF), health care providers (HP), revenues (FS) and DIS classification by revenues. For other SHA classifications, the mapping might be straight forward, but the document also provides specific recommendations for the HP classification (among other to correctly map HP by the primary activity of the provider and not by the place where whe service was provided), the FP classification and the DIS classification. The chapter also includes a short selection of indicators that might be useful to analyse the importance of COVID-19 expenditure in countries. In addition, IHAT in the JHAQ 2021 and WHO in the HAQ 2021 introduced in their data collection templates a number of special memorandum items for COVID-19 spending (HC.COV for current health expenditure, including 5 categories of notification HC.COV.1 to HC.COV.5, This document is destined to the countries’ teams in charge of the elaboration of health accounts studies and provides methodological guidance to track and classify, within SHA health accounts, coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) health expenditure and related expenditure according to the System of Health Accounts (SHA 2011) framework. HK.COV for capital expenditure related to COVID-19 and HCR.COV for spending of interest outside the boundaries of CHE). Several borderline cases and boundary issues exist nonetheless, and are discussed in this document: for example, spending on personal protective equipment (PPE) as intermediate consumption or for final use (to be included in current health spending), compliance costs in businesses (excluded from CHE), activities accounted as occupational health care (included in CHE), costs of quarantine (only medical costs and quarantine in health facilities are accounted as CHE), transfers to health care provider (should be specifically targeted to health providers to be registered as subsidy under CHE), etc. The present technical note is based on the discussions within the International Health Accounts Team (IHAT, including WHO, OECD and Eurostat) and health accounts experts that resulted in the development of guidance notes for the OECD, Eurostat and WHO Joint Health Accounts Questionnaire on tracking health expenditure related to COVID-19 (2,3). Chapter 2 is focusing on data collection, which is a key step of health accounts studies that will determine the comprehensiveness of the health financing flows reported. COVID-19 memorandum items provide additional information for international data reporting, but in principle, current health expenditure recorded under DIS.1.9.2 should be equal to HC.COV (Sum of HC.COV.1, HC.COV.2, HC.COV.3, HC.COV.4, HC.COV.5). General SHA accounting rules and guidelines still apply to current health expenditure on COVID-19 (primary intent of the activity to improve, maintain or prevent the deterioration of the health; qualified health knowledge and skills; consumption for final use of the resident population; existence of a transaction). Many actions related to the response to COVID-19 are therefore outside of the scope of SHA 2011 and of this technical note: quarantine compliance costs, social measures linked to the pandemic, etc.