Biomedical subjects

Pedro Pita Barros

Publications and source records attributed to Pedro Pita Barros.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2005

Negotiation advantages of professional associations in health care.

In several instances, third-party payers negotiate prices of health care services with providers. We show that a third-party payer may prefer to deal with a professional association than with the sub-set constituted by the more efficient providers, and then apply the same price to all providers. The reason for this is the increase in the bargaining position of providers. The more efficient providers are also the ones with higher profits in the event of negotiation failure. This allows them to extract a higher surplus from the third-party payer.

Health Care Costs↗

PubMed2003

Cream-skimming, incentives for efficiency and payment system.

Reform proposals of health care systems in several countries have advocated variations of a risk adjustment/capitation system. These proposals face a serious objection: incentives to risk selection are prevalent in the system. By now, considerable literature has been devoted to finding ways of mitigating, if not eliminating, this problem, while at the same time preserving incentives to efficiency. We contribute to this debate presenting a transfer system that, under some circumstances, attains both provider efficiency and no risk selection. The transfer system extends typical linear payment systems. It can be interpreted as a fixed transfer in the beginning of the period plus an ex-post fund at the end of the period. The novelty rests in the way contributions to this fund are defined.

Capitation Fee↗

PubMed2003

Random output and hospital performance.

Many countries are under pressure to reform health care financing and delivery. Hospital care is one part of the health system that is under scrutiny. Private management initiatives are a possible way to increase efficiency in health care delivery. This motivates the interest in developing methodologies to assess hospital performance, recognizing hospitals as a different sort of firm. We present a simple way to describe hospital production: hospital output as a change in the distribution of survival probabilities. This output definition allows us to separate hospital production from patients' characteristics. The notion of "better performance" has a precise meaning: (first-order) stochastic dominance of a distribution of survival probabilities over another distribution. As an illustration, we compare, for an important DRG, private and public management and find that private management performs better, mainly in the range of high-survival probabilities. The measured performance difference cannot be attributed to input prices or to economies of scale and/or scope. It reflects pure technological and organisational differences.

Cerebrovascular Disorders↗