Summary

Health care is one of the largest sectors in OECD countries, and accounts now for over 8% of GDP on average. Reliable international comparisons of health care expenditure levels are increasingly being sought by policy-makers and researchers, as several OECD countries re-examine the adequacy of total health spending, and the public and private shares of the expenditure.
This manual provides a set of comprehensive, consistent and flexible accounts to meet the needs of government and private-sector analysts and policy-makers. These accounts constitute a common framework for enhancing the comparability of data over time and across countries, and suggest basic links with non-monetary indicators.
The manual establishes a conceptual basis of statistical reporting rules compatible with other economic and social statistics and proposes a newly developed Internantional Classification for Health Accounts (ICHA) which covers three dimensions: health care by functions of care; providers of health care services; and sources of funding.
The System of Health Accounts provides basic concepts and definitions underlying the annual data collection of OECD Health Data. Once this accounting standard has been implemented in a large number of OECD countries, it will allow for more consistent and reliable comparisons of health care expenditure across countries.