The goal of this paper is to analyze changes in productivity and their relation with variations in citizens’ perceived satisfaction in the field of hospital care and specialized care in the Spanish regional health services for the period 1999-2004. To assess changes in productivity the...

Brazilian Welfare Policy, in its basic protection dimension, is implemented by public structures called as Referencial Centers of Social Assistence (Cras), which work at the local level (municipalities), but are organized, coordinated, legislated and co-financed by the federal government. This...

Due to expenditure increases that can be attributed to several reasons, healthcare systems throughout the world strive towards cost containment. In order to conduct it in a satisfactory manner, it is necessary fi rst to determine the sources of inefficiency in the process of providing healthcare...

Brazilian Welfare Policy, in its basic protection dimension, is implemented by public structures called as Referencial Centers of Social Assistence (Cras), which work at the local level (municipalities), but are organized, coordinated, legislated and co-financed by the federal government. This...

The introduction of hospital reimbursement based on diagnosis related groups (DRG) in 2004 has been a conspicuous attempt to increase hospital efficiency in the German health sector. In this paper changes of hospital efficiency, quantified as a Malmquist index decomposition in pure technical...

This work follows the series of studies conducted in Ipea, in order to compare the efficiency of the Brazilian health system to health systems of other countries. We evaluate the efficiency of expenditure in health care provision by comparing various output measures (life expectancy; infant...

Objective for this working paper is to analyze the effects of a reimbursement reform on somatic hospitals’ efficiency and quality, measured as patient experiences. By the reform a capitation-based block grant system was replaced by an activity-based system. Methods: Data on efficiency and...

Efficiency measurement has been one of the most extensively explored areas of health services research over the past two decades. Despite this attention, few studies have examined whether a provider’s efficiency varies on a monthly, quarterly or other, sub-annual basis. This paper presents an...

The health sector reform programme which began in Vietnam in 1989 in order to improve the efficiency of the health system has altered the way in which Vietnamese hospitals operate. The programme put the spotlight on input savings. This study aims to examine the relative efficiency of hospitals...

Greek health outcomes compare favourably with the OECD average. However, the health care system is seen as not working well by the population. One source of dissatisfaction is the high proportion of private household spending on health, including informal payments, while public health spending...