Venue: The Fuqua School of Business, Duke University, 1 Towerview Drive, Durham, NC 27708-0120

 

Presentation

Monitoring prioritization in a public health care sector

Authors: Jan Erik Askildsen (Health Economics Bergen); Tor Helge Holmås (Health Economics Bergen); Oddvar Kaarbøe (Health Economics Bergen)

Presenter: Oddvar Kaarbøe (Health Economics Bergen)

Discussant: John Goddeeris (Michigan State University)

Session: Patient's Role

Room: Geneen Auditorium

When: Monday 3:15 p.m. - 4:45 p.m.

This paper presents a new way to monitor priority settings in public health care systems. We take departure in medical guidelines and allocate ICD10 codes to the medical descriptions, which enables us to compare actual waiting times to medically recommended maximum waiting times. In this way we use the medical guidelines as a tool to monitor prioritization in the health care sector. In an application, using data from the Norwegian patient register (NPR), we focus on the following issue: do high priority patients (according to the medical guidelines) experience the shortest waiting time? The results indicate some degree of over-prioritization for patients of lower priority.