Costing of Health Services for Provider Payment: A Practical Manual

This is the first costing-specific resource that bridges costing theory — what you should do — with practical, step by step guidance on what you can do to address multiple challenges related to costing for provider payment in low and middle income countries (LMICs). Developed by the JLN Costing Collaborative, with support and facilitation from Results for Development Institute, the Manual takes traditional guidelines on step-down cost accounting one step further by providing practical options to overcome the real life challenges associated with costing in LMICs. Some common challenges addressed in the manual include data constraints, different concerns of public and private providers, weak cross-institutional collaboration, among others. This Manual provides tools and templates based on the day-to-day experiences of a network of practitioners that can be adapted to a variety of contexts due to the unique, collaborative approach used in its design. The diversity of experiences reflected in each step of the Manual offers a range of options that practitioners from other countries can draw on to become their own costing experts to improve provider payment policy processes