Financial incentives are increasingly adopted to improve allocative efficiency and quality in primary care. Although it has been recognised that incentive-based remuneration schemes can have an impact on GP behaviour, there is still weak empirical evidence on the extent to which such programs...

The design of incentive schemes that improve quality of care is a central issue for the healthcare sector. Nowadays we observe many pay-for-performance programs, where payment is contingent on meeting indicators of provider effort, but also other alternative strategies have been introduced, for...

Pay-for-performance programs offering additional payments to GPs can be used not only to improve the quality of care but also for cost containment purposes. In this paper, we analyse the impact of removing financial incentives in primary care that were aimed at containing hospital expenditure in...

We study care arrangement decisions in Italy, where families are increasingly delegating the role of primary caregiver to external (paid) people also for the provision of home care. We consider a sample of households with a dependent elderly person cared for either at home or in a residential...

The reformulation of existing boundaries between primary and secondary care, in order to shift selected services traditionally provided by Emergency Departments to community-based alternatives has determined a variety of organisational solutions aimed at reducing the ED overcrowding. One...

Over-crowding in Emergency Departments (EDs) generates potential inefficiencies. Using regional administrative data, we investigate the impact of an increase in the accessibility of primary care on ED visits in Italy. We test whether extending practice opening hours up to 12 hours/day reduces...

This paper examines the behaviour of public hospitals in response to the average payment incentives created by price changes for patients classified in different Diagnosis Related Groups (DRGs). Using panel data on public hospitals located within the Italian region of Emilia-Romagna, we test...

This study examines the effect of waiting times on hospital choice by using patientlevel data on elective Percutaneous Transluminal Coronary Angioplasty (PTCA) procedures in the Italian NHS over the years 2008-2011. We perform a multinomial logit analysis including conditional logit and mixed...

We study patient mobility in the Italian National Health System, using patient-episode level data on elective Percutaneous Transluminal Coronary Angioplasty procedures over the years 2008-2011. We examine how patients' choice of the hospital is affected by changes in waiting times and clinical...