The Good News:
Countries around the world are expanding access to care to millions, through health financing reforms.
The Challenge:
How can these countries strengthen their health system to meet huge new demand?
The
Joint Learning Network for Universal Health Coverage (JLN) is a peer-to-peer learning platform for policymakers and payers in low- and middle-income countries striving to finance universal coverage of their populations’ health care needs. The JLN now includes ten member countries in Asia and Africa:
Ghana, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Malaysia, Mali, Nigeria, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam. Joint learning among them is facilitated by partners leading four technical tracks: Quality, Provider Payment Mechanisms, Information Systems, and Expanding Coverage.
A global leader in the improvement of health care systems, IHI leads the JLN Quality Track, together with the international division of the UK-based National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), which has broad experience supporting the clinical effectiveness of health systems. The track is funded by a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation.
JLN Quality Track
A high-quality health system is defined by its fidelity to cost-effective evidence-based care, its capacity to continuously learn from and prevent errors, and its commitment to the respect and dignity of the patients and families it serves. Policymakers, payers, providers, patients and the public each have a role to play in achieving these goals; through collaboration, they can achieve an effective quality strategy that, combined with expansions in health care access, will achieve improvements in health outcomes.
The work of the Quality Track is directed at guiding, connecting and empowering payer institutions and their government partners from the JLN countries to impact the quality of health systems. Its goal is to develop, together with the JLN countries and other JLN tracks, a better understanding of the options available to payers to drive improvements in health system quality and to eventually support them in designing and testing strategies to improve the quality of the health delivery systems in those countries.
