Incentivising quality

At the recent ISPOR Annual Conference, OHE’s Chief Executive, Professor Graham Cookson announced a new programme of work on Value 2.0: Assessing the Value of US Healthcare to be funded by PhRMA. Graham was joined by the Innovation and Value Institute’s Executive Director Jenn Bright, and Harvard Medical School Professor Bapu Jena.

A new paper by OHE and Health Education England on the value of international volunteers’ experience to the NHS has been published in Globalization and Heath.

Research just published in Public Administration Review, co-authored by OHE’s Professor Graham Cookson, demonstrates that contracting out auxiliary public services may lower the quality of the core service as well as the auxiliary service. Studying NHS cleaning services, the research shows that contracted out cleaning is cheaper but lower quality and leads to worse health outcomes including higher rates of hospital-acquired infections.

OHE Lunchtime Seminar with NHS Improvement Economics Team Members Sarah Karlsberg, Steven Paling and Júlia Esquerré. The seminar will present evidence on where NHS trusts can take practical steps to reduce cancer waiting times. The project won the 2018 John Hoy Memorial Award for the best piece of economic analysis produced by government economists.

The latest publication from Professor Graham Cookson in Public Organization Review finds that waiting time targets adopted in the English NHS as part of the ‘targets and terror’ performance management regime did indeed reduce key waiting time measures, but at the expense of other quality metrics such as hospital readmission rates i.e. the policy was output distorting.

OHE Lunchtime Seminar with Dr. Aslam Anis, The University of British Columbia. The seminar will discuss the impact of the pan-Canadian Pharmaceutical Alliance “tiered pricing” framework (a flexible 'price-cap' regulation) on generic entry, the resulting drug expenditure levels from a drug plans’ perspective and the implications of price-capping policies on drug shortages.

A new OHE Briefing by Martin Chalkley (University of York) and Jon Sussex (RAND Europe) provides a view of the NHS ownership debate through the lens of economics.