The highly regarded Austrian health system delivers good quality and easily accessible services, but is costly. Its governance and funding structure is highly fragmented and it makes too much use of inpatient care in hospitals. Entry and competition opportunities are de facto limited in most...

Given how the healthcare sector records a continuous rise of costs, decision factors and theoreticians try to develop policies that will contribute to the improving the way resources are used.

This paper presents a set of indicators to assess health care system performance. It also presents new comparative data on health care policies and institutions for OECD countries. This set of indicators allows the empirical characterisation of health care systems and the identification of...

Il presente lavoro intende in prima battuta analizzare l'efficienza dei sistemi sanitari regionali sulla base della qualità percepita dai pazienti. Quest'ultima è stata calcolata sulla mobilità interregionale: flusso dei pazienti extra-regione (immigrati o mobilità positiva) confrontato con...

The Accident and Emergency Departments (A&EDs) are responsible for a large share of overall hospitalization, diagnostic activity, and ultimately health care expenditure. Most health care systems use retrospective reimbursement systems to finance A&E departments, but this system may not be...

Activity-based financing (ABF) was implemented in the Norwegian hospital sector from 1 July 1997. A fraction (30 to 50 per cent) of the block grant from the state to the county councils has been replaced by a matching grant depending upon the number and composition of hospital treatments. As a...

Using the 1997-1998 New South Wales public-hospitals comparison data, we investigate the hospital-level inefficiency by applying a stochastic-frontier multiproduct cost function. We use a flexible translog cost function to reduce the measurement errors of the outputs of the hospital. The main...

Many international institutions, including the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO), have recommended that countries adopt universal health care coverage, believing that adequate health care is a basic human right. Thailand became the first developing country to introduce universal...

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...

This paper aims to provide a general overview of the health care sector reform in Colombia, which introduced the market principles of competition into the sector functioning. Therefor, this article analyzes its antecedents, characteristics and consequences. Relying on the interpretation of the...