1. Align health financing and primary health care goals. As countries progress toward UHC, they grapple with dual challenges of how to provide universal access to essential health services and ensure financial sustainability.
  2. Engage the private sector in the provision of primary care. Most health systems need to engage both the public and private sectors to provide quality PHC services.
  3. Leverage medical audits to improve quality of care and system efficiency. Countries often struggle with the complexities of designing a strong medical audit system, but the results of medical audits provide crucial data.
  4. Use costing studies to inform evidence-based provider payment policy. Countries have identified costing to set evidence-based provider payment rates as the greatest technical challenge to developing payment schemes that incentivize providers to improve efficiency, deliver a higher quality of care, increase responsiveness to patients, and enhance the system’s sustainability.
  5. Employ data analytics to monitor provider payment systems and quality of care. Given the powerful effects that financial incentives have on providers for resource allocation and UHC outcomes, monitoring indicators that measure the quality and effectiveness of health services are vital data points for payment systems.

Read the source article on universal health coverage by Rozita Halina Tun Hussein, Amanda Folsom, and Dr. Somil Nagpal at Devex International Development