Health economics

Description

The goal of this module is to inform the decision-makers in the health care system, planners, doctors, and managers, about the principles of health economics and to train them to use analytical methods of economic science. They will use these methods for solving practical problems they are facing in everyday work – that includes knowledge and skills regarding how to allocate resources in the health care system, how to plan the development of the service, how to evaluate its work, how to set priorities among services and programs, how to provide financial sustainability of the health care system, and how to regulate the private practice.

The fields included in this module are: equity in the health care system, estimate of needs and analysis of requests and use, stimulation of activities for efficiency increase and continuous quality improvement, application of the method of economic evaluation with measurement and assessment of costs, measuring and assessment of work results and effects on the health of people.

The objective of this course is to provide scholars with the economic perspective of health care. To meet this objective scholars will: gain an understanding of the fundamentals of microeconomics as they apply to health care, explore different methods of paying for healthcare and containing costs and develop an understanding of economic evaluation, which type of economic evaluation suits various resource allocation questions and the issues with economic evaluation for priority setting.

Learning Outcomes

By the end of this course, participants will be able to:

1. Recognize the basic principles of health economics, as well as basic microeconomic theory of supply and demand
2. Distinguish between different techniques of economic evaluation: cost–minimization analysis, cost–effectiveness analysis, cost–utility analysis, and cost–benefit analysis,
3. Understand the market mechanisms in health care systems
4. Know how to measure and value costs and effects of health care interventions
5. Demonstrate a basic knowledge of how economics applies to research projects on evaluation of care
6. Understand managerial issues related to purchasing

Course Outline

1. The principles of health economics
2. Macroeconomic and health
3. Measurement of health outcomes and related costs
4. Supply, demand, and need forming prices in the health system
5. Market imperfection in health care and health insurance
6. Financing the health care system
7. Health insurance models and related incentives
8. Dynamics of cost in the health system
9. The competitiveness of health care organisations: costs and prices
10. Cost-utility, cost-effectiveness, and cost-benefit analysis
11. Allocation of resources based on the analysis of marginal costs
12. The process of decision making on the allocation of scarce resources
13. The example of dialysis versus renal transplantation
14. Roundtable discussion: centralisation versus decentralisation in health care
15. Scholarly presentations of seminar/field work

Training Delivery Methods

1. In-class method
2. Online method