This 2015 edition of Health at a Glance – OECD Indicators presents the most recent comparable data on key indicators of health and health systems across the 34 OECD member countries. For a subset of indicators, it also reports data for partner countries, including Brazil, China, Columbia, Costa Rica, India, Indonesia, Latvia, Lithuania, the Russian Federation and South Africa. This edition includes two new features: a set of dashboard indicators on health and health systems, presented in , summarising the comparative performance of OECD countries, and a special chapter on recent trends in pharmaceutical spending across OECD countries, presented in .

Health at a Glance 2015 presents cross-country comparisons of the health status of populations and the performance of health systems in OECD countries, candidate countries and key emerging economies. This edition offers two new features: a set of dashboard indicators on health outcomes and health systems (presented in ), which summarise the comparative performance of OECD countries; and a special chapter on recent trends in pharmaceutical spending across OECD countries. The key findings of this publication are as follows.

Health at a Glance 2015 presents comparisons of key indicators of health and health system performance across the 34 OECD countries, as well as for candidate and key partner countries where possible (Brazil, China, Colombia, Costa Rica, India, Indonesia, Latvia, Lithuania, the Russian Federation and South Africa). The data presented in this publication come mainly from official national statistics, unless otherwise indicated.

This chapter presents, for the first time, a set of dashboards which are designed to shed light on how well OECD countries do in promoting the health of their population and improving their health system performance. These dashboards do not have the ambition of identifying which countries have the best health system overall. They summarise some of the relative strengths and weaknesses of countries on a selected set of indicators on health and health system performance, to help identify possible priority areas for actions. These dashboards, which take the form of summary tables, highlight how well OECD countries are doing along five dimensions: 1) health status; 2) risk factors to health; 3) access to care; 4) quality of care; and 5) health care resources. For each of these five dimensions, a selected set of key indicators are presented. The selection of these indicators is based on three main criteria: 1) policy relevance; 2) data availability; and 3) data interpretability (i.e., no ambiguity that a higher/lower value means a better/worse performance). There is, however, one exception to the application of this third criterion: for the fifth dashboard on health care resources, more health spending or more human or physical resources does not necessarily mean better performance. This is why the ranking of countries is displayed differently.

Across OECD countries, pharmaceutical spending reached around USD 800 billion in 2013, accounting for about 20% of total health spending on average when pharmaceutical consumption in hospital is added to the purchase of pharmaceutical drugs in the retail sector. This chapter looks at recent trends in pharmaceutical spending across OECD countries. It examines the drivers of recent spending trends, highlighting differences across therapeutic classes. It shows that while the consumption of medicines continues to increase and to push pharmaceutical spending up, cost-containment policies and patent expiries of a number of top-selling products have put downward pressure on pharmaceutical prices in recent years. This resulted in a slower pace of growth over the past decade. The chapter then looks at emerging challenges for policy makers in the management of pharmaceutical spending. The proliferation of high-cost specialty medicines will be a major driver of health spending growth in the coming years. While some of these medicines bring great benefits to patients, others provide only marginal improvements. This challenges the efficiency of pharmaceutical spending.