PLoS Medicine
(Accessed 6 December 2014)
http://www.plosmedicine.org/

Health in Action
Tracking Rural Health Facility Financial Data in Resource-Limited Settings: A Case Study from Rwanda
Chunling Lu mail, Sandy Tsai, John Ruhumuriza, Grace Umugiraneza, Solange Kandamutsa, Phillip P. Salvatore, Zibiao Zhang, Agnes Binagwaho, Fidele Ngabo
Published: December 02, 2014
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pmed.1001763
Summary Points
:: Tracking financial data for rural health facilities is difficult in low-income countries because of unstandardized accounting practices and the absence of effective health financial information tracking systems.
:: Poor-quality financial data hinders monitoring and evaluation of health facility performance.
:: We present a five-step procedure developed for gathering financial data from 21 health centers in two rural districts of Rwanda.
:: The five-step procedure generated financial data with internal consistency and a low percentage of reports of “missing” for in-kind support (donated goods and services). In-kind support (mainly medicine and equipment) accounted for a large proportion of the total expenditure of health centers.
:: We report challenges faced by the project and make suggestions for how Rwanda’s national web-based financial data collection system can be improved.
Knowledge gained from the Rwanda field experience may inform other low-income countries on how to establish an information system to track health facility financial data.