Event Details

The seminar series in Health Economics is an initiative of HEAL - Health Economics at Lancaster.

Prospective payment systems incentivise providers to reduce production costs and adopt more efficient care pathways. When these incentives are insufficient or adoption is judged to be too slow, payers may decide to reimburse providers in excess of their production cost to accelerate adoption. The National Health Service in England introduced a pay-for-efficiency (P4E) policy in 2010 to reduce overnight hospital stays in favour of ambulatory care (i.e. day case surgery). For 32 conditions, hospitals now receive a higher DRG tariff for ambulatory care than for inpatient care, even though the marginal cost of production of ambulatory care is already lower.

In this talk I will present results of a quasi-experimental evaluation of the P4E policy and discuss some of the methodological challenges in evaluating 32 different experiments as part of a single study.

About the Speaker

Nils Gutacker is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Health Economics, University of York. His research focuses on the optimal organisation of healthcare markets, the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of hospital pay-for-performance schemes and the economics of medical practice variation.

He is especially interested in the increasing use of patient-reported outcome measures to assess and incentivise the behaviour of healthcare providers in the English NHS and internationally. His work has been published in leading field journals in health economics and health services research.