The use of evidence-based clinical guidelines is an essential component of chronic disease management. However, there is well-documented concern about variability in the quality of clinical guidelines, with evidence of persisting methodological shortcomings. The most widely accepted approach to...

This review aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of strategies to implement clinical guidelines for chronic disease management in primary care in EU Member States.

Clinical guidelines are advocated to improve the quality of care, especially for chronic diseases. However, the regulatory basis of clinical guidelines, their development, quality control, implementation and use as well as evaluation within countries across the European Union is not...

This article discusses the development of Heath Technology Assessment methods and HTA institutions, in regards to meeting the information needs of all levels and fields of health policy-making. On the one hand, HTA needs to expand and develop its methods. Although health products and health care...

The concept of health system responsiveness is an important dimension of health system performance assessment. Further efforts have been made in recent years to improve the analysis of responsiveness measurements, yet few studies have applied the responsiveness concept to the evaluation of...

Funding of diagnostic and therapeutic methods in Germany's statutory health insurance (SHI) follows a dichotomy: in outpatient care, only methods with proven benefit are reimbursed while in inpatient care, all methods may be provided unless they are excluded due to proven harm or lack of...

Measures of avoidable deaths incorporate the notion that deaths from certain causes should not occur within specified age groups given effective prevention or timely and appropriate access to health care. The present study investigated the impact on specific types of avoidable cancer deaths...

In the past, free price setting mechanisms in Germany led to high prices of patented pharmaceuticals and to increasing expenditures in the pharmaceutical sector. In order to control patented pharmaceutical prices and to curb increasing pharmaceutical spending, the Act for Restructuring the...

The German hospital market has been subject over the past two decades to a variety of healthcare reforms. Particularly the introduction of diagnosis-related groups (DRGs) in 2004 aimed to increase efficiency of hospitals. The objective of the paper is to review recent studies comparing the...