The English Department of Health has introduced routine collection of patient-reported health outcome data for selected surgical procedures (hip and knee replacement, hernia repair, varicose vein surgery) to facilitate patient choice and increase provider accountability. The EQ-5D has been...

Accounting for variation in the quality of care is a major challenge for the assessment of hospital cost performance. Because data on patients’ health improvement are generally not available, existing studies have resorted to inherently incomplete outcome measures such as mortality or...

In most sectors of the economy, specialisation is associated with lower costs. Yet some specialised hospitals claim to require more generous funding than general hospitals. This claim is based on the assertion that their patients are different, and that these differences outweigh the cost...

English health policy has moved towards establishing specialist multi-disciplinary teams to care for patients suffering rare or particularly complex conditions. But the healthcare resource groups (HRGs), which form the basis of the prospective payment system for hospitals, do not explicitly...

If specialisation is supposed to reduce costs why is reimbursement often more generous for specialist than non-specialist hospitals? Specialist hospitals claim that gains from specialism are offset because they attract patients with more complex care requirements. We assess the foundation for...

Accounting for variation in the quality of care is a major challenge for the assessment of hospital cost performance. Because data on patients’ health improvement are generally not available, existing studies have resorted to inherently incomplete outcome measures such as mortality or...