Doctoral Course in Health Economics and Policy

Presentation

The health care sector is extremely complex, and this gives rise to a number of regulatory issues. These concern how the health system should be organised, how incentives should be designed, and how performance should be evaluated. The objective of the course is to give students an introduction to how health systems are constructed; the role of regulation; the complexities of evaluating policy and performance; and the contribution that health economics can make to the development of health policy.

Objectives

• At the end of the module, the students will have an understanding of:
• How the health system is organised and of the key relationships between different parts of the system.
  The role of regulation in the health system and the nature of the regulatory problem.
• Be familiar with principal-agent models and how these can be applied to the regulatory
  setting.
• The complexities of evaluating policy initiatives in non-experimental settings.
• The idea of ‘yardstick competition’, the design of regulatory instruments, the challenges involved
  in designing optimal reimbursement systems and the relative strengths and weaknesses of different payment mechanisms.
• The challenges involved in assessing the output of the health care system, in how to measure health care inputs, and in how to calculate health system productivity and productivity change.
• The challenges involved in comparing health system performance across different countries and the issues involved in evaluating the performance of different parts of the health system.

For further information on the SSPH+ International Doctoral Courses and Seminars in Health Economics and Policy: https://idep.usi.ch/teaching/phd