Beginning in 1999, Ontario introduced pay-for-performance incentives for selected preventive primary care services and defined sets of other services provided by family physicians, with the goal of improving the quality of patient care. These performance incentives were considerably expanded in...

1.0 Background Since 1994, the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-term Care (MOHLTC) has used an equity funding formula to allocate new funding for the delivery of long-term care (LTC) community services, which includes home care services and community support services in the province.[Ontario...

A common goal of health policy is to allocate public health care resources according to need. This paper presents a method for developing needs-based funding formulae using individual-level linked health survey and utilization data. Needs-based funding shares are developed in three basic stages:...

We conducted a literature review of studies on Physician Assistants working in a variety of settings and found few evaluation studies on the costs and/or effectiveness of Physician Assistants in primary care practices, Emergency Departments and in hospital settings other than Emergency...

Health-related external benefits are of potentially large importance for public policy. This paper investigates health-related external benefits using a stated-preference discrete-choice experiment framed in a health care context and including choice scenarios defined by six attributes related...

Background- Canada’s public health insurance system fully covers medically necessary hospital and physician services, but does not cover community-based non-physician mental health provider services or prescription drugs. Almost 2/3 of Canadians have private supplemental insurance for extended...

Health funding reforms often fail to change organizations’ and individuals’ behaviour in the way that policy makers intend. This is perhaps because financial incentive systems traditionally have been designed according to a “reward-punishment,” or behaviourist, model of influencing human...

We develop a model to analyze alternative health care financing arrangements. Health care is demanded by individuals varying in income and severity of illness. There is a limited supply of health care resources used to treat individuals, causing some individuals to go untreated. We examine...

This paper presents the findings from simulations of the introduction of publicly funded Medical Savings Accounts in the province of Ontario, Canada. The analysis exploits a unique data set linking population-based health survey information with individual-level information on all physician...

Surveys of Canadian physicians show that, on average, general/family physicians have been reducing hours of direct patient care in recent years. We currently have little understanding of how changing hours of work relate to service provision. This project examines this relationship using...