In a paper published by Ma (1994) it was argued that the prospective payment system in the hospital industry was superior to the cost based reimbursement system to achieve both cost reduction and quality improvement ob jectives. In the analysis, it was assumed that quality and costs decisions...

The aim of this paper is to analyse hospitals’ response to the Diagnosis Related Groups-based prospective payment system in its first year of implementation in Italy. It investigates the short-term variations of the average length of stay, the case flow, the occupancy rate, and the rate of...

Objective: This study aims to investigate whether specific treatments or combinations of treatments are significantly associated with the profitability of Swiss acute-care hospitals under the current diagnosis-related group (S-DRG) reimbursement system, while accounting for differences between...

This study covers “tapering scale” mechanism in hospital payments, i.e. mechanisms linking unit prices to the volume of services produced. This paper begins with an overview of hospital services and hospital payment methods in OECD countries, focusing more specifically on DRG-based payment....

In the last decade, Italy has experienced a considerable decentralization of functions to the regions. This transformation has been especially relevant for the National Health System that has de facto assumed a federal system design. The federal reform aimed at disciplining public health...

Ecofin and Oecd methodology is used to reconstruct the historical evolution of public current health care expenditure for Italy and Lazio (an Italian Region). The reconstructed evolutions allow to detect what have been the per-capita expenditures per age brackets in absolute values (Euro) in...