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Getting Better: Improving Health System Outcomes in Europe and Central Asia
FIGURE 3.11
Cholesterol Testing Can Be Expanded 40
% of population
30
20
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Country Sources: European Commission 2007; World Bank 2012a. Note: Figure measures the percentage of respondents who have had a cholesterol test in the past 12 months.
cardiovascular disease has been reviewed favorably as an intervention to promote both health and development more broadly (Gaziano et al. 2006; Jha et al. 2012).
System Measures to Strengthen Primary Care for Heart Disease Achieving better outcomes through improved control of cardiovascular disease risk factors will require removing barriers to adherence on the patient side and creating stronger incentives on the provider side. There are no guaranteed recipes for improvement, but certain policy initiatives offer promise. Broader institutional reform issues related to primary care are discussed in chapter 6. On the demand side, an important step toward improving access to drugs and adherence to treatment regimens would be to include basic drugs for cardiovascular disease in outpatient drug benefit packages. Across much of the ECA region, coverage of pharmaceuticals by government or social health insurance plans is lower than in the EU-15, and thus out-of-pocket payments for
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