The OneHealth Tool is a software tool designed to inform national strategic health planning in low- and middle-income countries.
While many costing tools take a narrow disease-specific approach, the OneHealth Tool attempts to link strategic objectives and targets of disease control and prevention programmes to the required investments in health systems. The tool provides planners with a single framework for scenario analysis, costing, health impact analysis, budgeting and financing of strategies for all major diseases and health system components. It is thus primarily intended to inform sector wide national strategic health plans and policies.
Outputs from an application will help planners answer the following questions:
What would be the health system resources needed to implement the strategic health plan (e.g., number of nurses and doctors required over the next 5-10 years)?
How much would the strategic plan cost, by year and by input?
What is the estimated health impact?
How do costs compare with estimated available financing?
The development of the OneHealth tool is overseen by the UN InterAgency Working Group on Costing (IAWG-Costing). WHO provides technical oversight to the development of the tool, facilitates capacity building and provides technical support to policy makers to inform national planning and resource needs estimates. The first official version of the OneHealth Tool was released in May 2012. Since then the tool has been applied in over 55 countries to date, most of which in sub-Saharan Africa.
