Is patient choice the future of health care systems?

Is Patient Choice the Future of Health Care Systems?

Patient and user choice are at the forefront of the debate on the future direction of health and public services provision in many industrialized countries in Europe and elsewhere. It is used both, as a means to achieve desired policy goals in public health care systems such as greater efficiency and improved quality of care, and as a good with its own intrinsic value. However, the evidence sug...

Patient Choice Has Become the Standard Practice in Healthcare Provision: It is Time to Extend its Meaning; Comment on “Is Patient Choice the Future of Health Care Systems?”

The key argument of this commentary is that patient choice has a broader meaning than suggested by consumerist choice models. In increasingly marketized health care systems with diversified and knowledge-based service arrangements, patients are continuously obliged to choose insurers, physicians or hospitals and treatments—whether they like it or not. However, health care users refer to a wide ...

Care Integration – From “One Size Fits All” to Person Centred Care; Comment on “Achieving Integrated Care for Older People: Shuffling the Deckchairs or Making the System Watertight for the Future?”

Integrating services is a hot topic amongst health system policy-makers and healthcare managers. There is some evidence that integrated services deliver efficiencies and reduce service utilisation rates for some patient populations. In their article on Achieving Integrated Care for Older People, Gillian Harvey and her colleagues formulate some critical insights from practice and research around...

Hospital Choice for Cataract Treatments: The Winner Takes Most

Background Transparency in quality of care is an increasingly important issue in healthcare. In many international healthcare systems, transparency in quality is crucial for health insurers when purchasing care on behalf of their consumers, for providers to improve the quality of care (if necessary), and for consumers to choose their provider in case treatment is needed. Conscious consume...

Why Even the Logic of Re-Defined Choice May Still Contradict the Logic of Care in Public Health Systems?

Regional Incentives and Patient Cross-Border Mobility: Evidence from the Italian Experience

Background In recent years, accreditation of private hospitals followed by decentralisation of the Italian National Health Service (NHS) into 21 regional health systems has provided a good empirical ground for investigating the Tiebout principle of “voting with their feet”. We examine the infra-regional trade-off between greater patient choice (due to an increase in hospital services supply) an...