Purpose: The United States devotes a larger share of its GDP to health care and spends more on health care per capita than any other country. The sheer size of the total spending on health care, at approximately $3.5 trillion in 2017, puts significant pressure on all payers and crowds out other...

Debate over healthcare often focuses on two key issues: quality and cost. However, because of the unique characteristics of healthcare, this relationship is not as simple as it might seem. A recent Supreme Court of Canada judgement directly addressing aspects of quality of care, combined with...

Ten years ago, Holm's highly influential paper "Goodbye to the simple solutions: the second phase of priority setting" was published [Holm S. Goodbye to the simple solutions: the second phase of priority setting in health care. British Medical Journal 1998;317:1000-7]. Whilst attending the 2nd...

Due to resource scarcity, every health system worldwide must decide what services to fund, and conversely, what services not to fund. In order to institute and refine a macro-level priority setting framework within a large, urban health authority in Alberta, Canada, researchers and decision...

Background: Decision makers within the Calgary Health Region adopted and applied programme budgeting and marginal analysis (PBMA) for priority-setting activity across major service portfolios within the Region. Methods: Seventeen in-depth qualitative interviews were conducted with senior...

As resources in health care are scarce, health authorities and other health organizations are charged with determining how best to spend limited resources. While a number of formal approaches to priority setting within health authorities have been used internationally, there has been limited...

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to present a detailed case study of the evaluation strategies of a complex, multi-faceted response to a public health emergency: drug-related overdose deaths. It sets out the challenges of evaluating such a complex response and how they were overcome. It...

Purpose: Despite growing attention to physician engagement there is a lack of literature to guide the development of physician-led interventions. A scoping review was conducted to describe physician-led strategies that have been implemented to promote increased physician engagement in acute...

Purpose: Current conditions have intensified the need for health systems to engage in the difficult task of priority setting. As the search for a “magic bullet” is replaced by an appreciation for the interplay between evidence, interests, culture, and outcomes, progress in relation to these...