In a period where decentralisation seemed to be the prominent trend, Norway in 2002 chose to re-centralise the hospital sector. The reform had three main aims; cost control, efficiency and reduced waiting times. This study investigates whether the hospital reform has improved hospital...

This article focuses on describing the methodological challenges intrinsic in international comparative studies of hospital productivity and how these challenges have been addressed within the context of hospital comparisons in the Nordic countries. The hospital sectors in the Nordic countries...

Previous studies indicate that Finnish hospitals have significantly higher productivity than in the other Nordic countries. We decompose the productivity levels into technical efficiency, scale efficiency and country specific possibility sets (technical frontiers). Data have been collected on...

This article describes the methodological challenges associated with disease-based international comparison of health system performance and how they have been addressed in the EuroHOPE (European Health Care Outcomes, Performance and Efficiency) project. The project uses linkable patient-level...

The objective of this study is to perform a cross-country comparison of cancer treatment costs in the Nordic countries, and to demonstrate the added value of decomposing documented costs in interpreting national differences.