Awareness of the costs of health care services is a prerequisite to deliver them effectively and efficiently in the context of scarcely available financial resources, and aids managers to optimally deliver health care. For social health protection schemes knowledge of costs of health services allows to determine reimbursement rates and can contribute to improving quality of care, hereby optimizing purchasing. Despite the promising applications of costing, costs of health services are rarely defined in resource poor countries because of unavailability of data at health facility level and lack of personnel with the necessary skills to conduct the assessments. Resulting, costing studies tend to be expensive whereby they are infrequently conducted and limited to a few facilities and health services.
The GIZ Social Health Protection Project tries to remedy this by establishing a Routine Health Services Costing System that regularly costs the delivery of selected health services by a national representative sample of health facilities. This is done in collaboration with the Department of Planning and Health Information and the National Institute of Public Health, both Ministry of Health, and -in addition to GIZ- financially supported by USAID and P4H. The initial aim is to facilitate price setting for the purchase of health services by social health protection programs such as the recently initiated social health insurance of the National Social Security Fund. At a later stage the results should aid health facility managers.
