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The Academic Health Economists' Blog

May 8, 2012

Managed Clinical Networks

Discussions of hospital organisation focus a lot on how particular services should be arranged in order to provide high quality care without sacrificing on equity. Many studies, looking at a wide range of different procedures, have identified a benefit from volume. Those units that perform more of a certain procedure generally have better outcomes. As [...]

April 16, 2012

The Role of Healthcare in Promoting Health Equity

Why should we consider health equity? The rationale for treating health as a special good rests on the idea that a certain level of health is a precondition for achieving any of the other outcomes in life that we value. Sen identifies that health contributes to a person’s ability to choose the life she has [...]

April 4, 2012

Making Conclusions about Provider Quality

Now that the Health and Social Care Bill is the Health and Social Care Act, more focus will be placed on sources of information regarding provider performance. In order for patients to make informed choices about where they wish to receive their care they need good quality information about outcomes at different institutions. The typical [...]

March 27, 2012

Human Capital, Endogenous Growth and Hospital Performance

In the health economics literature we often treat a hospital as a healthcare producing ‘firm’. We define cost-functions and perform efficiency analysis, for example. However, this sort of analysis is certainly hampered by the difficulty in measuring healthcare production. One of the inputs to a hospital production function is human capital and as such I [...]

March 7, 2012

Rationing and Deprivation in Risk Sharing Schemes

Here in the UK, NICE sometimes advises against the provision of particular drugs, by the NHS, on the grounds that evidence does not indicate them to be cost-effective. In some cases it appears that these ‘rejections’ are the result of insufficient data rather than comprehensive data against the use of the drug. On occasion the [...]

February 16, 2012

The Ethics of Doing Nothing

Can we reasonably consider ‘doing nothing’ as an alternative course of action? In many cost-effectiveness analyses the intervention under consideration is compared against a ‘doing nothing’ scenario, although frequently the next best alternative is used. Ultimately the health technology assessment carried out by NICE is an informative effort and the final decision is made by [...]

February 7, 2012

The Efficiency of Treating Fat Smokers

Recent changes to the NHS raise the potential for health care providers to deny treatment based on an individual’s characteristics, such as their weight or whether they smoke. I think this calls for a reminder of the implications of discriminating in this way, and why, I think, we would do best to avoid it. Public preferences [...]

January 16, 2012

Income Inequality and Health

The ongoing Occupy… protests around the world have brought more attention to the debate on income inequality in the world. Wage variance has increased in the last thirty years, most notably in the United States. In the UK, for example, the top decile of earners took home 31% of all income compared to 28% ten [...]

December 19, 2011

Tools of the Trade

Simulation and data analysis are two of the principle parts of health economics research. Most Master’s courses teach both, although many focus more heavily on the former. There are many programs and packages available to a researcher, each with their own strengths and weaknesses, however some have more weaknesses than others. Microsoft Excel continues to [...]

December 2, 2011

Cancer Drugs and Public Preferences

Last year the UK government announced the establishment of a £600 million cancer drug fund, to be spent over 3 years. This represents a minuscule amount of money compared to the NHS’s annual budget, which is in excess of £100,000,000,000. However, it demonstrates the government’s preference for expenditure on the treatment of cancer over and above other [...]