Within the EU it is the Member States' primary responsible to organise, provide and finance health care for their citizens, and so their health care sytems are sometimes differing substantially. However, in order to address citizens' needs for good information and knowledge at European level, Member States agreed to a set of data collections that ensure high quality and comparability of a set of health care data for evidence based policy decisions at EU level.
In addition, recent developments on joint data collections together with the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) and the World Health Organisation (WHO) in the area of the system of health accounts as well as for data on human and physical resources for health care allow for improving international comparability and to reduce the burden for respondents.
