International Journal of Health Care Finance and Economics This is an RSS file. You can use it to subscribe to this data in your favourite RSS reader or to display this data on your own website or blog.

Impact of COVID-19 on hospital screening, diagnosis and treatment activities among prostate and colorectal cancer patients in Canada
We examined hospital cancer screening, diagnosis, treatment, length of stay, and mortality data among prostate and colorectal cancer patients between April 2017 and March 2021. Baseline trends were established with data between April 2017 and March 2020 for comparison with data collected between April 2020 and March 2021. Scenario analyses were performed to assess the incremental capacity requirements needed to restore hospital cancer care capacities to the pre-pandemic levels.ResultsFor prostate cancer, A 12% decrease in diagnoses and 5.3% decrease in treatment activities were observed during COVID-19 between April 2020 a...
Source: International Journal of Health Care Finance and Economics - April 2, 2023 Category: Health Management Source Type: research

Analyzing the effect of health reforms on the efficiency of Ecuadorian public hospitals
This study aims to assess whether Ecuadorian health reforms carried out since 2008 have affected the efficiency performance of public hospitals in the country. We contribute to the literature by shedding new light on the effects on public healthcare efficiency for developing countries when policies move toward health equity and universal coverage. We follow a two-stage approach, wherein the first stage we make use of factor and cluster analysis to obtain three clusters of public hospitals based on their technological endowment; we exploit Data Envelopment Analysis for panel data in the second stage to estimate robust effic...
Source: International Journal of Health Care Finance and Economics - March 16, 2023 Category: Health Management Source Type: research

Improving diagnosis-based cost groups in the Dutch risk equalization model: the effects of a new clustering method and allowing for multimorbidity
This study examines to what extent the Dutch RE model can be further improved by redesigning one key morbidity adjuster: the Diagnosis-based Cost Groups (DCGs). This redesign includes (1) revision of the underlying hospital diagnoses and treatments ( ‘dxgroups’), (2) application of a new clustering procedure, and (3) allowing multi-qualification. We combine data on spending, risk characteristics and hospital claims for all individuals with basic health insurance in the Netherlands in 2017 (N = 17 m) with morbidity data from general prac titioners (GPs) for a subsample (N = 1.3 m). We first simulate a baseline...
Source: International Journal of Health Care Finance and Economics - March 2, 2023 Category: Health Management Source Type: research

The short-term effects of fixed copayment policy on elderly health spending and service utilization: evidence from South Korea ’s age-based policy using exact date of birth
AbstractA large number of the poor elderly in Korea have been exposed to the risk of insufficient proper medical treatments because of financial restrictions. South Korea launched policies to reduce the cost-sharing burden on the elderly, including one compelling the elderly to pay a fixed out-of-pocket amount for outpatient treatments. The impacts of such policies, however, have yet to be elucidated. In this paper, we estimate the short-term effects of the fixed outpatient copayment policy on the health-related behavior of the elderly. We employed a regression discontinuity design by using the exact days before and after ...
Source: International Journal of Health Care Finance and Economics - February 28, 2023 Category: Health Management Source Type: research

Children, vaccines, and financial incentives
AbstractRecent studies have been analyzing and measuring the efficacy of the use of financial incentives to increase the Covid-19 vaccine uptake. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the only study available in the literature that aims to measure the effect of financial incentives on vaccine rates among children. This paper explores the effects of a specific financial incentive on parents ’ vaccination decisions for their children. Using data from a regional practice, where students aged 12 and older received $50 gift cards per Covid-19 vaccination dose, we use various methodologies (synthetic control, linear regr...
Source: International Journal of Health Care Finance and Economics - February 28, 2023 Category: Health Management Source Type: research

The effect of performance pay incentives on market frictions: evidence from medicare
AbstractMedicare has increased the use of performance pay incentives for hospitals, with the goal of increasing care coordination across providers, reducing market frictions, and ultimately to improve quality of care. This paper provides new empirical evidence by using novel operations and claims data from a large, independent home health care firm with the Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program (HRRP) penalty on hospitals providing identifying variation. We find that the penalty incentive to reduce re-hospitalizations passed through from hospitals to the firm  for at least some types of patients, since it provided more...
Source: International Journal of Health Care Finance and Economics - December 22, 2022 Category: Health Management Source Type: research

Does the market reward quality? Evidence from India
AbstractThere are two salient facts about health care in low and middle-income countries; (1) the private sector plays an important role and (2) the care provided is often of poor quality. Despite these facts we know little about what drives quality of care in the private sector and why patients seek care from poor quality providers. We use two field studies in India that provide insight into this issue. First, we use a discrete choice experiment to show that patients strongly value technical quality. Second, we use standardized patients to show that better quality providers are not able to charge higher prices. Instead pr...
Source: International Journal of Health Care Finance and Economics - December 7, 2022 Category: Health Management Source Type: research

Minimum wages and health: evidence from European countries
This study investigates the effects of minimum wage on health, well-being, and income security in European countries. The empirical strategy consists of exploiting variations in the minimum wage across European countries over time. We show that minimum wage increases improve individuals ’ self-reported health and income security. Minimum wage increases also improve life satisfaction and happiness. The effects are largest among women, employed individuals, married individuals, and those with less than a secondary education. Our results are robust to several robustness checks and c onsistent with existing evidence on the r...
Source: International Journal of Health Care Finance and Economics - November 22, 2022 Category: Health Management Source Type: research

Determinants of life expectancy at birth: a longitudinal study on OECD countries
AbstractThis paper analyses the influence of several determinants on life expectancy at birth in 36 OECD countries over the 1999 –2018 period. We utilized a cross-country fixed-effects multiple regression analysis with year and country dummies and used dynamic models, backward stepwise selection, and Arellano–Bond estimators to treat potential endogeneity issues. The results show the influence of per capita health-care ex penditure, incidence of out-of-pocket expenditure, physician density, hospital bed density, social spending, GDP level, participation ratio to labour, prevalence of chronic respiratory diseases, tempe...
Source: International Journal of Health Care Finance and Economics - November 11, 2022 Category: Health Management Source Type: research

Exploring the effectiveness of demand-side retail pharmaceutical expenditure reforms
AbstractIncreasing expenditures on retail pharmaceuticals bring a critical challenge to the financial stability of healthcare systems worldwide. Policy makers have reacted by introducing a range of measures to control the growth of public pharmaceutical expenditure (PPE). Using panel data on European and non-European OECD member countries from 1990 to 2015, we evaluate the effectiveness of six types of demand-side expenditure control measures including physician-level behaviour measures, system-level price-control measures and substitution measures, alongside a proxy for cost-sharing and add a new dimension to the existing...
Source: International Journal of Health Care Finance and Economics - September 21, 2022 Category: Health Management Source Type: research

The influence of strong and weak ties in physician peer networks on new drug adoption
AbstractPhysicians interact and exchange information through various social networks. Understanding peer effects through different networks can help accelerate new medical technology and innovative treatment adoption. In this research, we measure the influence of strong-tie and weak-tie connections on new drug adoption and study the overlap between advice-discussion and patient-sharing network. We construct two physician networks with strong and weak ties from peer nomination surveys and commercial medical claims data. We design a dynamic system to define peer adoption status and build patient-level hierarchical logistic m...
Source: International Journal of Health Care Finance and Economics - July 24, 2022 Category: Health Management Source Type: research

The union advantage: union membership, access to care, and the Affordable Care Act
We describe a “union advantage” in health insurance coverage and access to care. Using multiple statistical models and data from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey for 1996–2019, we show that—compared to non-union workers—union workers are more likely to have health insurance coverage (98% vs. 86%), m ore likely to have a regular care provider (83% vs. 74%), visited office-based providers 31% more often (5.64 vs. 4.27 visits), spend $832 more on healthcare annually, and pay a lower share of their expenditures out-of-pocket (26% vs. 37%). When we control for demographic characteristics across vari ety of specifi...
Source: International Journal of Health Care Finance and Economics - July 6, 2022 Category: Health Management Source Type: research

Pricing behavior in long term care markets: evidence from provider-level data for home help services
AbstractExploiting a rich data set on the Dutch market for home help services, we find that larger providers obtain a higher price than do small providers. However, compared to other studies on market power in care markets this price difference is considered small to moderate. Our identification strategy relies on the exogenous variation in market shares in January ’07, the very first month after home help was decentralized to municipalities. Zooming in on our main outcome, we obtain that the small but significant effect of market size on price is merely driven by the pricing behavior of for-profit providers. (Source: In...
Source: International Journal of Health Care Finance and Economics - May 27, 2022 Category: Health Management Source Type: research

Disability specific equivalence scales: a case –control approach applied to the cost of acquired brain injuries
This study estimates the household costs resulting from acquired brain injuries in terms of a reduction in the standard of living. The application uses primary data collected in the Verona and Florence provinces of Italy integrating highly detailed health information with information about consumption, income, wealth, time-use and relational well-being describing the standard of living. In general, the estimates of disability costs in previous studies are obtained from survey data without a specific focus on individuals with disabilities but collect information on the general health status. In contrast, this study exploits...
Source: International Journal of Health Care Finance and Economics - May 24, 2022 Category: Health Management Source Type: research

Private equity and its effect on patients: a window into the future
(Source: International Journal of Health Care Finance and Economics)
Source: International Journal of Health Care Finance and Economics - May 23, 2022 Category: Health Management Source Type: research