Each assessment area comprises of several questions and for each question background information is provided outlining why the question is important and why it matters in order to make progress towards UHC. Four progress levels are articulated for each question to illustrate what progress looks like. The core of the Progress Matrix is the belief that there are better and worse ways of designing and implementing health financing reforms, reflected in the desirable attributes. These in turn are based on accumulated global evidence as well as “common sense” thinking from the perspective of UHC assessed at the “whole system, whole population” level.

For each progress level, further information and reflections are provided to guide the Principal Investigator in their assessment. This focuses on characteristics that reflect increasing levels of “progress” in terms of the features of systems that are associated (and ideally have a causal effect) on health system performance goals and intermediate objectives, again from a system-wide perspective. The progress levels, labels and generic characteristics are presented below; note that some questions focus only on a) policy development, while others also address b) implementation.