The OECD Health Care Quality Indicator (HCQI) Project was started in 2001. The long-term objective of the HCQI Project is to develop a set of indicators that can be used to raise questions for further investigation concerning quality of health care across countries. It was envisioned that the...

Policy-makers responsible for publicly-funded drug programmes face continual pressures between the demand to accommodate a steady stream of new and more effective drugs and the ongoing requirement to control costs. In the face of these pressures, a growing number of OECD countries are applying...

This paper represents an attempt to set out a conceptual framework for the OECD’s Health Care Quality Indicator (HCQI) Project. Two main issues are tackled: what concepts, or dimensions, of quality of health care should be measured and how, in principle, should they be measured. The need for a...

Waiting times for elective (non-urgent) surgery are a main health policy concern in approximately half of OECD countries. Mean waiting times for elective surgical procedures are above three months in several countries and maximum waiting times can stretch into years. They generate...

There is much interest in the Japanese health care system from the perspective of other OECD countries. The Japanese health care system appears to perform well. What explains this apparently good performance? This paper aims both to provide a description of how the Japanese health system works...

Waiting times for elective surgery are a significant health policy concern in approximately half of all OECD countries. The main objectives of the OECD Waiting Times project were to: i) review policy initiatives to reduce waiting times in 12 OECD countries; and ii) to investigate the causes of...

Health systems in OECD countries are under pressure to improve their performance. Against that background, this paper has three main aims: To compare concepts of the ‘performance’ of health care systems developed by the WHO and by the OECD, with ‘performance frameworks’ adopted in...