Introduction

As we have seen in the last topic, the healthcare system is the set of resources, organization, funding and management that aim to offer health actions and services to a certain population. Each country adopts one or more health system models according to its political, economic, cultural, and social interests.

Several rankings have been published in order to evaluate healthcare systems, and the main difference between them is the methodology used to develop the ranking. Table 1 exemplifies the three major world rankings based on the evaluation of healthcare system performance.

Table 1: General characteristics of healthcare system rankings.

Source: Adapted from Schütte et al. (2018).

Figure 1 represents the performance of the world's health systems according to the World Health Organization's report published in the year 2000. From the figure, it can be seen that the countries that performed best in that period were: France, Italy, San Marino, Andorra, Malta, Singapore, Spain, Oman, Austria and Japan. The U.S. ranked 37th and Brazil 125th in this ranking. The country with the worst performance in the same period was Sierra Leone.

Figure 1: Global Distribution of the Overall Efficiency of Health Systems.

Source: Tandon et al. (2000, p. 15).

Table 2 highlights the health systems with the best efficiency scores according to the Bloomberg Rankings. The table shows that Singapore and Hong Kong SAR (an autonomous region of the People's Republic of China that maintains separate legal, administrative, and judicial systems from the rest of the country), located on the Asian continent, have the best health care systems in the world. Also, according to the same report, the U.S. and Brazil ranked 44th and 50th, respectively.

Table 2: Most efficient healthcare systems of 2014 according to the Bloomberg Ranking.

Source: Adapted from Bloomberg Rankings (2014).

In 2021, the WHO created the SCORE for Health Data Technical Package (SCORE), in order to help Member States strengthen country data systems and monitor progress towards better health indicators.

Health information systems are being expanded around the world in an unprecedented way. The report published in 2021 by WHO presents data from 133 health information systems of countries over the period 2018 to 2020 and assesses the parameters related to information system optimization: search, count, optimization, review and enabling.

According to the report, 68% of the countries have the capacity for public health surveillance. In addition, 4 out of every 10 deaths worldwide are not recorded in information systems and are therefore not accounted for properly. To know more about the SCORE for Health Data Technical Package click on the link: https://bit.ly/ka1p3.

The website Cuponation conducted a survey of the health rates of about 100 countries in the year 2021. According to this survey, Taiwan (86.38%), South Korea (82.36%), and France (80.56%) had the best health quality rates. Venezuela (39.48%), Bangladesh (42.12%), and Iraq (44.53%) had the worst rates. Brazil ranked 66th with an estimated 57.79% quality. To learn more about the Cuponation report, go to the link: https://www.cuponation.com.br/insights/saude-2021.

Wrap Up

In this topic, you learned about the world ranking of healthcare systems according to the WHO and Bloomberg Rankings. You noted that in the year 2000, the French healthcare system was considered the best system in the world, whereas in the year 2014, Singapore's healthcare system obtained the best efficiency scores. You also learned about the SCORE for Health Data Technical Package, a WHO report on health information systems. In the next topic, you will learn about Singapore's healthcare system, considered the best in the world in the year 2014. See you soon!