Background: Recently, enormous efforts to measure the quality of health care have been made (i.e. AHRQ, OECD) in order to get information about ways to improve the quality of health care. However this area of research is still in an early stage of development and more research has to be done....

The objective of this paper is to identify selected forces of the decrease in the number of avoidable deaths from ischaemic heart diseases (IHD) in West and East Germany from 1996 to 2004. Our main result reveals that the number of intracardiac catheter facilities,which are an important...

The objectives of this paper are to identify the driving forces of health system performance in Germany as measured by the number of avoidable deaths from ischaemic heart diseases (IHD) and to assess the extent to which health authorities can influence health system performance. We find health...

The objective of this paper is to identify selected forces of the decrease in the number of avoidable deaths from ischaemic heart diseases (IHD) inWest and East Germany from 1996 to 2004. Our main result reveals that the number of intracardiac catheter facilities,which are an important...

Medical technological progress has been shown to be the main driver of health care costs. A key policy question is whether new treatment options are worth the additional costs. In this paper we assess the causal effect of percutaneous transluminal coronary angioplasty (PTCA), a major new heart...