Global Inpatient and Outpatient Health Care Utilization, Unit Costs, and Costs and Services Needed to Achieve Universal Health Coverage 1990-2016

As part of a study to inform plans to achieve Universal Health Coverage (UHC), IHME research generated estimates on utilization and unit cost of outpatient visits and inpatient admissions, and estimated the additional services and funds needed to meet a UHC standard for utilization. Using 1175 country-years of outpatient and 2068 of inpatient data, utilization per person estimates were produced for outpatient visits and inpatient admissions by age and sex for 195 countries and territories for 1990-2016. Data from 795 National Health Accounts (NHAs) were used to produce cost per outpatient visit and inpatient admission estimates for 188 countries for 1995-2016. UHC standards of utilization per disability-adjusted-life-year (DALY) based on existing health systems were created to estimate the additional services and funding needed annually to expand health coverage for countries in 2016. Results of the study were published in The Lancet in December 2018.