Controlling in Hungarian hospitals: history and key issues

The aim of this review paper is to illustrate the areas of interest and the thinking of Hungarian hospital managers by providing a summary of the relevant Hungarian health care controlling literature and to give an introduction of potential research directions. The paper summarizes the “public discourse” and thinking on controlling, and simultaneously highlights the priorities of health care as well. The main range of interest are the financing problems and their solutions, as well as other kind of uncertainty arising from the continuous changes in roles and measures. In the early ninties some health care institutions started to apply controlling systems as a result of the introduction of performance-based financing and often published articles about it up to 2004. In 2015, a project created to enhance the operational efficiency of the health care system restarted controlling thinking: unified management measures required for hospitals may induce the development of the controlling data service, more accurate reporting, management attention, and experience sharing.