A developing emphasis of health care reforms has been creating organisations with responsibilities for strategic commissioning of services for defined populations. Such organisations must set priorities in aiming to meet their populations’ needs subject to a budget constraint. This requires...

Over the last decade the British Labour Government has presided over unprecedented increases in levels of spending on the National Health Service (NHS). But Opposition parties now claim that this record growth in NHS expenditure has been misspent, and some commentators are already predicting...

In the 1990s, countries experimented with two models of health care reforms based on choice of provider and insurer. The governments of the UK, Italy, Sweden and New Zealand introduced relatively quickly ‘internal market’ models into their single-payer systems, to transform hierarchies into...

Third party payers for health care, when introducing policies to promote equity, through formulas for resource allocation by capitation, and efficiency, through prospective payment by case-mix, have sought to make adjustments for “unavoidable” hospital costs, which are caused by structural...

STUDY OBJECTIVE: To determine the relative costs of prostheses and factors associated with changes in these cost rankings. DESIGN AND SETTING: Economic model using published data. MAIN RESULTS: The main cost drivers are current costs and revision rates. Expected revision costs are a small...

Many Decision Analysis interventions can be thought of as helping people to discuss what constitutes value for their organization. One approach to Decision Analysis which takes this view particularly seriously is Decision Conferencing, where valuations assessed locally within particular...

Portfolio Decision Analysis: Improved Methods for Resource Allocation provides an extensive, up-to-date coverage of decision analytic methods which help firms and public organizations allocate resources to 'lumpy' investment opportunities while explicitly recognizing relevant financial and...