As the demand for increasingly more diverse and complex health care grows, many countries in the stages of development, as well as those with more evolved health care systems, need to evaluate health care at many levels, including quality of health care, budget planning and hospital costs, administrative procedures, policy- and decision-making, and other areas. In isolation, individual small geographic areas, clinics, hospitals and projects have devised evaluation mechanisms, yet these seem inadequate to evaluate health care on a national level. Utilizing a broad spectrum of examples, the author stresses the use of all available data on health system performance and a comparison with the standards the system is meant to meet. These standards relate not only to biomedical matters, but to administration, resource use, and public demand. This unique approach examines the basic information, standards, techniques, and results in the field of national health system evaluation, and
looks to the future of this important, necessary process.