A common goal of health policy is to allocate public health care resources according to need. This paper presents a method for developing needs-based funding formulae using individual-level linked health survey and utilization data. Needs-based funding shares are developed in three basic stages:...

In 1996, a newly elected government in the Province of Ontario, Canada, introduced a managed competition environment into the home care sector through the establishment of a competitive contracting process for home care services. Through 65 in-depth, semi-structured interviews conducted between...

In Ontario, Community Care Access Centres (CCACs) oversee managed competition by home care agencies for service delivery contracts. Contracts are to be awarded to the agencies that provide the highest quality services at the lowest price. We examined the impact of two rounds of competitive...

Measuring Consistency of Personnel in Home care: Current Challenges and Findings Consistency of personnel is important to ensuring continuity of care for home care clients. It is particularly important to those clients who are at high risk for adverse effects when provider changes occur....

Beginning in 1999, Ontario introduced pay-for-performance incentives for selected preventive primary care services and defined sets of other services provided by family physicians, with the goal of improving the quality of patient care. These performance incentives were considerably expanded in...

In 1986, Louise Russell published her landmark book, “Is Prevention Better Than Cure?”, in which she evaluated the health and economic benefits of preventive health care interventions and tested the validity of the common assumption that prevention saves money. While debunking the myth that...

Background - The geographic distribution of health care funding in Canada has traditionally been based on past allocations and the distribution of health care facilities and providers. Whether this approach has succeeded in distributing resources among populations in keeping with relative health...

Needs-based health care funding methods are increasingly being considered for the Canadian health care system, particularly as a basis for allocating funds from central Ministries of Health to local and regional health authorities. Standardized Mortality Ratios are one of the commonly used...

Objectives: This article examines the extent of geographic disparity in premature mortality in Ontario and considers factors that may underlie variations in premature mortality across geographic areas. Data Source: Mortality data for years 1992-1996 were obtained from Vital Statistics Records,...

We conducted a literature review of studies on Physician Assistants working in a variety of settings and found few evaluation studies on the costs and/or effectiveness of Physician Assistants in primary care practices, Emergency Departments and in hospital settings other than Emergency...