background: in 2012, switzerland changed from retrospective to prospective hospital payment based on diagnosis related groups (drgs), following the example of the united states, australia, and germany. as in these countries, the objective of this transition was to motivate hospitals to improve efficiency by making them bear financial risk to some extent.objective: this contribution seeks to fin...

BACKGROUND Shortage and maldistribution of the health workforce is a major problem in the Thai health system. The expansion of healthcare access to achieve universal health coverage placed additional demand on the health system especially on the health workers in the public sector who are the major providers of health services. At the same time, the reform in hospital payment methods resulted i...

BACKGROUND With the recognition that public hospitals are often productively inefficient, reforms have taken place worldwide to increase their administrative autonomy and financial responsibility. Reforms in China have been some of the most radical: the government budget for public hospitals was fixed, and hospitals had to rely on charges to fill their financing gap. Accompanying these changes ...

BACKGROUND Whether activity-based financing of hospitals creates incentives to treat more patients and to reduce the length of each hospital stay is an empirical question that needs investigation. This paper examines how the level of the activity-based component in the financing system of Norwegian hospitals influences the average length of hospital stays for elderly patients suffering from isc...

Equity in healthcare in British Columbia is defined as the provision of services based on need rather than ability to pay and a separation of contributions to financing from the use of services. Physician and hospital services in Canada are financed mainly through general tax revenues, and there is a perception that this financing is progressive. This paper uses Gini coefficients, concentration...

On December 21st 2007, the Swiss Federal Parliament passed the new financing of hospital care through a DRGbased performance payment system (SwissDRG). The new financing method is due to come into force on January 1st 2012 and hospitals are now facing the challenge of adapting their cost accounting systems to support both the tariff negotiation process with health insurers and the internal stra...

A review of reforms in the financing of hospital services in eight European countries and Australia reveals a commitment to a common objective of relating resource use to hospital workload by means of a standardized case-mix framework in the pursuit of greater efficiency. While this objective is also shared with the U.S. prospective payment system (PPS), it is noteworthy that the majority of co...