Pay for performance (P4P) is the latest rage in healthcare quality monitoring. Paying physicians more who provide high quality care makes sense intituitvely. The U.S. isn’t the only country to hop on the P4P bandwagon. In 2001, the Australian government initiated a financial incentive program for “improved management of diseases such as asthma and diabetes [...]
Read the rest of this entry »Archive for the 'International Health Care Systems' Category
What does a NICE health economist do?
What role do health economists at the UK’s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) play and how do they conduct their cost effectiveness analyses for new treatments? I answer this question today based on NICE’s own documents. According to their guidelines manual, the role of the health economist in clinical guideline development is to: [...]
Read the rest of this entry »Hospital Quality Reporting in Italy
In the U.S. patients can use Hospital Compare to evaluate the quality of care individuals receive at each hospital in the U.S. In Italy, there is P.Re.Val.E. A paper by Renzi et al. explains: A Regional Outcome Evaluation Program (P.Re.Val.E.) was launched in the Lazio region of central Italy starting in 2005 (Fusco et al. [...]
Read the rest of this entry »For-profits dominate the Hospital landscape in France?
“European healthcare systems…are always presented [in the media] as public sector nirvanas. The Guardian in the UK, for instance, can write po-faced articles praising the French system without acknowledging, for a single moment, that private-for-profit hospitals make up a larger percentage of sales in France than they do in the USA. Or that home care [...]
Read the rest of this entry »Is Ireland a Single Payer System?
Yes and no. All persons resident in Ireland are entitled to receive health care through the public health care system, which is managed by the Health Service Executive and funded by general taxation. Like Medicare in the U.S., the public health system requires coinsurance payments for certain types of care. Poor individuals (or those on [...]
Read the rest of this entry »Iran: A model for Rural Health Care
Access to care for rural Americans can be difficult, even for individuals covered by Medicaid. The New York Times examines whether Iran can serve as a model to serve rural Americans, such as those located in the Mississippi delta. The Iranians built “health houses” to minister to 1,500 people who lived within at most an [...]
Read the rest of this entry »Medical Billing: Taiwan vs. U.S.
How long do you think it takes for physicians and hospitals to bill an insurer for a service? Uwe Reinhardt notes that the answer depends on where you live. If you are in the U.S.: In the United States, claims settlement for medical procedures under private health insurance can take up to three months; [...]
Read the rest of this entry »Health Care Quality in Cuba
Many people who claim the U.S. healthcare system is broken point to Cuba as a country that spends little on health but gets high returns. Michael Moore’s documentary Sicko even visited Cuba and claimed that it could be a model for a single payer system in the U.S. As the Economist reports: “Until recently, Cubans [...]
Read the rest of this entry »Red de Protección Social: CCTs in Nicaragua
Oportunidades (formlerly known as Progresa) is a well known initiative in Mexico that provides cash payments to families in exchange for regular school attendance, health clinic visits, and nutritional support. The program started in 1997 as a program known as Progresa; Oportunidades in its current form began in in 2002. Oportunidades, however, is not the [...]
Read the rest of this entry »International Approaches to Comparative Effectiveness Research
Comparative Effectiveness Research (CER) aims to determine whether a drug or medical procedure’s are more cost-effective than alternative treatments and/or none at all. Although the U.S. is not known as a leader in CER research (in part because public health insurance bodies such as Medicare do not take CER evidence into account when making coverage [...]
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