Calendar year 1987 was one of the worst on record for health care carriers. I'm sure that most of your managements are reeling from the financial results of 1987. Companies, still experiencing losses, are desperately hoping for a quick turn around. I presume that is why this room is as full as it is. You are trying to find another tool to help you figure out how to solve the health care financi...

©2004 Association of Schools of Public Health In 2000, approximately 125 million Americans (45% of the population) had chronic conditions and 61 million (21% of the population) had multiple chronic conditions. The number of people with chronic conditions is projected to increase steadily for the next 30 years. While current health care financing and delivery systems are designed primarily to tr...

______________________________________________________ Abstract The purpose of this study was to analyse the development of productivity and efficiency in the production of hospital care in Finland during the period 1988-1994. A special interest was directed to the impact of health care financing reform in 1993. The analysis is based on the Malmquist index approach using linear programming. Pos...

The implementation of policies remains a huge challenge in many low-income countries. Several factors play a role in this, but improper management of existing knowledge is no doubt a major issue. In this article, we argue that new platforms should be created that gather all stakeholders who hold pieces of relevant knowledge for successful policies. To build our case, we capitalize on our experi...

OBJECTIVE To propose a tool to assist trialists in making design decisions that are consistent with their trial's stated purpose. STUDY DESIGN AND SETTING Randomized trials have been broadly categorized as either having a pragmatic or explanatory attitude. Pragmatic trials seek to answer the question, "Does this intervention work under usual conditions?," whereas explanatory trials are focuse...

STUDY OBJECTIVE Previous studies have shown that charges for inpatient and clinic procedures vary substantially; however, there are scant data on variation in charges for emergency department (ED) visits. Outpatient ED visits are typically billed with current procedural terminology-coded levels to standardize the intensity of services received, providing an ideal element on which to evaluate ch...

The US Institute of Medical sponsors a "Summit on Integrative Medicine and the Health of the Public" on February 25-27, 2009. A prestigious body of speakers and attendees created a dynamic conference in which the content and discussions provided vital information for transforming the US health care system. Topics included: patient-centered care, the scientific basis of integrative medicine, hea...

Health systems in most high-income countries aim to provide a comprehensive range of health services to the entire population and to ensure standards of quality, equity and responsiveness. Although approaches vary widely, responsibility for developing the overall framework for financing and organizing health care usually lies with the central government, while governance of the health system is...

INTRODUCTION National health accounts (NHAs) provide useful information to aid in understanding the health care financing system. This article aims to present a profile of health system financing in Dubai using data from the NHA. We also aim to compare the provider structure of financing schemes in Dubai with those of the State of Qatar and selected Organization for Economic Cooperation and Dev...

Objective The results of an evaluative longitudinal study, which identified the effects of health care decentralization on health financing in Mexico, Nicaragua and Peru are presented in this article. Methods The methodology had two main phases. In the first, secondary sources of data and documents were analyzed with the following variables: type of decentralization implemented, source of finan...