Background: Across the member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), pay-for-performance (P4P) programs have been implemented in the inpatient sector to improve the quality of care provided by hospitals. However, little is known about whether such...

Indonesia and Vietnam have both experienced considerable growth in the private health sector in recent years. What are the policy implications of this growth?This paper, the third in a series on the role of non-state sector hospitals in Indonesia and Vietnam, reflects on the major themes of the...

In efforts to decrease emergency department (ED) crowding and health care costs, frequent users of ED services have been targeted for interventions to decrease their utilization. Previous studies have had different definitions for frequent users and have considered all frequent users as a...

This paper investigated the delivery of health services based on data recorded at two medium-sized hospitals: Erenkoy Mental Health Research and Training Hospital located in Istanbul/Turkey and LVR-Klinik Viersen in Germany. A comparison of quality management systems in terms of certification...

We exploit variation across Italian Regions in the implementation of region-specific tariffs within a Prospective Pay System (PPS) for hospitals based on Diagnosis Related Groups (DRG) to assess their impact on health and on the use of health care services. We consider survey data for the years...

A common reform used to increase consumer choice and competition in public services has been to allow private providers to compete with public incumbents. However, there remains a concern that not all consumers are able to benefit equally from wider choice. We consider the case of publicly...

The for-profit hospital is in the minority numerically in all developed countries. Although the for-profits' market share has been quite stable for decades, for-profit chains have grown in share and influence in the United States. By contrast, for-profit chains have made few inroads in other...

Medicare 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...

In Ecuador, a new constitution came into force in 2008 aimed at promoting universal health coverage, affecting all hospitals managed by the Public Ministry of Health, while leaving remaining hospitals unaffected. This gave us a novel opportunity to examine the impact of health policy reform on...