Health Systems Financing in the EU

In the afternoon sessions, discussing the conclusions and findings in the presentation of a new excellent report from Jan Zapal et al. on "Health Systems Financing in the EU" the discussion on incentives in healthcare seemed finally to take off.




What is most known is that in the UK pay for performance have been in place for a couple of years and although according to Sarbani Chakraborty from the World Bank not all the results are positive she still thinks this the way also Europe has to go.



What is most known is that in the UK pay for performance have been in place for a couple of years and although according to Sarbani Chakraborty from the World Bank not all the results are positive she still thinks this the way also Europe has to go.

The conclusions from Léon Wever the Director of Financial and Economic Affairs at the Ministry of Health that "money isn’t the problem but allocation within the system" I for one assume aimed at supporting this.

Miroslav Zamecnik who is a Member of the Czech Governments National Economic Council underlined with a smile, not so strange given the turnover of health ministers trying to reform the Czech system, that we can discuss levels but it’s pretty obvious that we have to do it even if its political costly. The session mostly underlined the need for something to be done while next session where Professor Reinhard Busse presented we got more hands on exemplified what this means for example with regards to chronic disease care management. It was mentioned that for example in Denmark where a system of Year of care payment are in place, in France where a per patient bonus system are used. Busse also suggested in his presentation that cost sharing with chronic disease patient groups is the next step in these efforts.

Former deputy minister of Finance in Hungary Professor Peter Mihalyi raised the question to the panel about their views on Health Technology Accounts. Czech Deputy Minister Pavel Hrobon answered that this technically is a very good idea but there is some basic problems meaning for example that they need to be obligatory and that this politically still is not possible. It would be interesting to see if they are not both front-runners in a debate that are just taking off.

The Zapal report deserves a more in detail presentation so I will come back to this document later. Presentations will be available after the conference on http://czpres.mzcr.cz/Categories/558-Downloads.html