The Health Financing Progress Matrix (HFPM) is a standardized approach to assessing a country’s health financing system. Primarily qualitative in nature, the HFPM considers health financing institutions, processes, policies and their implementation, assessing how aligned these are with a set of desirable attributes, which are a synthesis of what works in health financing to accelerate progress to universal health coverage (UHC). Country assessments highlight priorities for future action, allow progress to be monitored over time, and are used to build a Global Knowledge Database to facilitate learning between countries.
Complementing both quantitative measures of UHC performance such as financial protection, and the health expenditure estimates available in the Global Health Expenditure Database, the health financing progress matrix captures and assesses shifts in the development and implementation. By getting closer to real-time monitoring of health financing policy, the health financing progress matrix provides more up-to-date (close to real time) action-oriented feedback to policy makers.
Implementing the HFPM has considerable capacity building benefits when driven locally, with expert support, and also provides the focus to bring multiple stakeholders together around a common agenda, to focus scarce resources on priority actions and interventions, and to transparently track progress over time. Version 2.0, released in late 2020, is the culmination of almost three years of conceptual development and country testing.
