Learning health policy lessons from other countries' experiences

Learning policy lessons from the experience of other countries requires knowledge about contextual factors. An analytical framework that measures the relevant institutional factors of the political environment on the basis of a standardized set of indicators is one way to satisfy this criterion. At the same time, however, these studies often do not include the results of health policy implementation. Many comparisons of healthcare systems have a similar bias. They focus on the institutional structure and do not concentrate on outcomes such as health status and health inequalities. If we want to learn more about improved practice in healthcare systems, studies need to include outcome measures. And if we want to learn about successful health policy implementation, we need both to define and measure health policy results. In our contribution we present frameworks for international health policy comparison that capture actors, institutions, and programmatic results.