Health for All: Using RuleWatcher to Navigate the Global UHC Movement

Author

Vanessa Alexander Charles

Institute of Science Tokyo, Student, MPH program

Overview

As a public health professional and medical doctor pursuing a Master of Public Health (MPH), with exposure to chronic diseases (like diabetes), I am deeply interested in policy and governance. RuleWatcher will be used for research by studying global and regional health equity, with a special connection to Saint Lucia and the Caribbean.

I aim to help change the conditions that create illness by monitoring UHC policies that will equip me with the tools to understand how laws shape health access and outcomes and advocate effectively for systemic change, not just clinical interventions. I would like to engage with government, donors, and international agencies using evidence-based arguments.

I am deeply invested in Small-State, resource-constrained countries like Saint Lucia, which often lack real-time access to comparative health policy data and visibility in global health research or funding platforms. Through the use of RuleWatcher, we may be able to bridge that gap and empower medical professionals to see what other small countries are doing and benchmark their country’s efforts. This data allows us to advocate for inclusion in regional and global dialogues.

RuleWatcher is a web-based intelligence support platform, developed by OSINTech, that provides primary information related to social and environmental issues from over 1,300 manually selected sources. It uses AI to continuously retrieve and crawl articles, offering a unified format across various fields and breaking down language barriers. RuleWatcher is currently being used by citizens, researchers, businesses, and governments to tackle complex issues and make informed decisions, especially in the public affairs sector.

Description of the research

In the global drive to eliminate health inequalities, Universal Health Coverage (UHC) is more than just policy; it’s a fundamental human right ensuring access to essential health services without financial ruin (World Health Organization, 2025). However, the road to UHC is uneven, and progress has plateaued in recent years. The UHC Service Coverage Index saw rapid gains from 2000 to 2015 (from ~45 to 68 out of 100), but progress has stalled mainly since, with no improvement from 2019 to 2021 (World Health Organization, 2025).

An estimated 4.5 billion people lack access to essential health services, and 2 billion face catastrophic health spending (WHO & World Bank, 2023). Despite these gaps, countries continue to experiment with diverse UHC models, legal frameworks, and cross-sector reforms, most of which are captured in legislative records. To understand this evolving landscape, seventy (70) recent articles tagged under UHC and health equity were used, using RuleWatcher’s advanced filtering and metadata features.

Over three (3) days, several major policy and legislative trends were identified that shape UHC globally, and five (5) dominant policy trends were identified.

All 70 articles explicitly cited health equity, highlighting its central role in legislative intent. This included legal mandates for access regardless of gender, nationality, or employment status. Several African and Latin American countries introduced legislation targeting vulnerable groups such as displaced populations, women, and rural communities.

Over 60% of articles emphasized UHC as a constitutional or legislative right, aligning with WHO recommendations (WHO & World Bank, 2023). For example, in Kenya, newly passed UHC laws guarantee service access in rural counties through decentralization and a national digital health registry.

About half the articles focused on revenue mobilization, including mandatory national health contributions, employer-funded schemes, and progressive taxation. In the Philippines and Ghana, health financing bills were introduced to expand national insurance coverage to informal sector workers.

Digital health tools were mentioned in 40% of articles as a pillar of scalable, inclusive UHC. In the Pacific Islands, RuleWatcher tracked regional eHealth legislation supported by multilateral organizations.

One-third of the articles referenced civil society engagement, transparency clauses, or independent UHC monitoring commissions. Latin American reforms often tied funding approval to public participation and citizen review mechanisms.

These findings underline how RuleWatcher helps identify early signals in global UHC policymaking well before full laws are enacted.

A great example is the Saint Lucia’s Health System Strengthening Project, tracked in detail on RuleWatcher, which provides a blueprint for small island states by piloting performance-based financing (PBF) for NCDs like diabetes, introducing digital health records and integrated referral systems and drafting legislation to create a UHC Authority and define a national health benefit package (World Bank, 2024).

RuleWatcher highlights relevant regional developments from CARICOM and the OECS, helping Saint Lucian policymakers anticipate trends and align regionally.

How I used RuleWatcher

The ‘search across all themes’ function was used to search across all themes for keywords, as Health falls under many of the current themes and the current version of RuleWatcher does not have a Health theme as yet, including Universal Health Rights → health inequities and Water sources → infectious diseases.

The keywords “universal health care” and “UHC” were searched, and two hundred and sixty-two (262) articles were noted.

Other functions of RuleWatcher were used to understand the general scope of the trends related to UHC, as well as to visualize the countries that are involved in the policy-making process.

As I wanted to explore the health equity trends on a global scale about UHC, I added the tag “health equity” and selected “global” as the region of choice. Seventy articles were noted to meet the criteria.

After downloading the CSV file for those seventy articles, the file was uploaded into generative AI; ChatGPT and direction was given to analyse the trending patterns contained within those articles as a basis of this research paper.

What has worked well in combination with external tools

The CSV file was clean and structured well for analysis, which makes RuleWatcher quite compatible with most generative AI. For example, fields like summary, themes, tags, and country were clearly defined and rich with proper metadata, which allowed rapid thematic clustering, keyword extraction, and country filtering, and the dataset contained natural language summaries, which made it easy to extract trends using AI-supported tools.

Findings and usefulness

Some of the key themes identified by RuleWatcher included Universal Human Rights (featured in 100% of articles). UHC is consistently framed as a fundamental human right, aligning with global commitments under SDG 3 (Good Health and Well-being). Under Corporate and Public Sector responsibilities, increasing emphasis on how both governments and multinational actors (e.g., pharmaceutical companies, insurers) contribute to health outcomes and inequalities was noted. In the Food Systems, Water Access, and Education articles, UHC and health equity are discussed with broader determinants such as food security, clean water, and education access, especially in low-income regions.

The most common tags included Health equity (in all articles), which reinforces equity as the central concern in global health policy, Investment, and Covid-19, due to financial reforms and pandemic responses that are driving current policy changes. Gender inequality and civil society were linked to intersectionality, and the role of local advocacy is increasingly central. Displaced people, governance, and food security also featured heavily, revealing structural and geopolitical drivers. All articles were tagged as Multinational, indicating global relevance or transnational frameworks. Some locations mentioned include Africa, Pacific Islands, Latin America, and the Global South, concerning the disparity between high- and low-income countries in policy implementation.

Key policy shifts with global impact include:

• Gavi and the Global Fund announced recommitments to equitable vaccine access through legally binding multilateral agreements. These aim to ensure universal immunization as a legal right, not just an emergency measure, paving the way for future UHC policies.
  

• Several articles reference digital health infrastructure, especially in the Pacific and Sub-Saharan Africa, as critical to delivering UHC. Policies are being passed to support national digital health IDs, telemedicine, and interoperable health records.
  

• New WHO and World Bank data in multiple reports highlight underfunding of health systems and call for legislative action on progressive taxation and health insurance mandates.
  

• There's a noticeable global shift toward progressive financing models, with growing political will to legislate mandatory contributions for health coverage, especially in emerging economies.
  

• Health legislation increasingly includes explicit protections for displaced people, women, and indigenous communities. For example, human rights organizations are pushing for laws that guarantee access to care regardless of documentation status.
  

• Across regions, articles note increased civil society influence on UHC-related legislation. Countries that involve NGOs and community groups in policy drafting show higher trust and better uptake of UHC reforms.

Comparison with conventional search methods

Unlike academic journals or databases (which lag months behind), RuleWatcher shows active and emerging legislative processes, not just outcomes. Each article came with human-readable tags like “health equity”, “investment”, or “governance”, allowing instant trend detection. RuleWatcher includes small states, regional blocs, and non-Western countries often underrepresented in legacy policy trackers. The summaries were digestible, searchable, and well-suited to generative AI models, meaning better synthesis and fewer manual inputs needed from the user.

RuleWatcher excels not just because it collects information, but because it organizes policy data in a way that invites analysis and trend spotting. It also complements and improves upon traditional policy research models, especially for cross-national comparison, and early-stage monitoring, in fields like health, climate, and human rights.

Can other services have the same function?

Several services offer pieces of what RuleWatcher does, but not the whole stack, which includes global policy coverage, Live rule/legislation tracking, thematic alerts, comparative tools, small-state inclusion, and generative AI compatibility. I explored the following sites as a reference for comparison: https://www.oecd.org/, https://www.lexisnexis.co.uk/, https://www.policymap.com/, and https://www.govtrack.us/. Most have similar policy tracking but lack most of the features listed above.

Conclusions and Perspectives

UHC reform is happening everywhere, but not always visibly. Legislation often precedes reform by months or years, and early-stage developments are buried in gazettes, committee hearings, and draft budget bills. RuleWatcher makes these processes transparent and searchable, and the user can compare outcomes easily. It connects national efforts to global movements and gives stakeholders the tools to track, adapt, and take the lead. In a world of fragmented health futures, RuleWatcher ensures no policy and no person is left behind.

Potential for future use

UHC as a Legal Right is a powerful narrative arc, as several global initiatives are moving toward recognizing UHC as a legally enforceable entitlement. RuleWatcher can be used to track standard legislative instruments (e.g., national health insurance bills, equity impact assessments) and identify when UHC-related policies have stalled. Policy reformers and researchers would hold systems accountable for real legal change, not just promises.

Many health professionals, NGOs, and communities learn about UHC laws after they’re passed, when it’s too late to shape them. By using RuleWatcher, users would receive alerts for early-stage drafts, stakeholder consultations, and any amendments made.

This initiative enables early advocacy and technical input by health experts and supports timely policy briefs, public mobilization, or technical feedback.

References

Pan American Health Organization. (2024). Progress in universal health in the Americas. https://doi.org/10.37774/9789275129470

World Bank Group. (2023). Tracking universal health coverage: 2023 global monitoring report. https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/entities/publication/1ced1b12-896e-49f1-ab6f-f1a95325f39b

World Bank. (2024). Saint Lucia Health System Strengthening Project (P166783) - Implementation Status & Results Report. https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/099062824154042114/pdf/P166783-5c7043b9-088a-4955-98c5-24684b73450d.pdf

World Health Organization. (2025, March 26). Universal health coverage (UHC). https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/universal-health-coverage-(uhc)

World Health Organization, & World Bank. (2023). Tracking universal health coverage: 2023 global monitoring report. https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789240080379