Rural E-Health Infrastructure Development - E-Healthcare Systems and Wireless Communications - page 196

Figure 5. Solution Implementation Framework

health economics to the health sector (Mills &
Gilson, 1988). As good health became a major
determinant of economic growth and a component
of the human development indexes in the last
twenty years, health economics developed as a
sub-discipline of economics and is touching many
of the main theoretical areas of this discipline.
Amongst the standard categories of economic
theory it touches we can find topics like demand,
consumer choice, production technology, supply,
markets, industrial organization, economics of
information incentive structure and social welfare
(Mwabu, 2007).
Throughout the world, health care and he
shapers of modern health care systems behold
the raising of spending with alarm. For instance,
for more than 50 years spending has raised by 2
percentage points in excess of GDP growth in
all OECD countries (Drouin, Hediger & Henke,
2008). To understand complex systems we use
models. Health care became an increasingly

complex system and therefore Figure 6 illustrates
the main driving forces of it.
Although all these theoretical aspects can
provide an interesting insight into the field of
health economics, none of them can offer adequate
understanding of health care on their own ( Hand-
book of Health Economics, 2000). Therefore, we
present in Figure 7 a basic framework for under-
standing how the different theoretical aspects of
economics interlace in order to provide a reason-
able view of health care nowadays:

A. The main question concerning health eco-
nomics is what exactly influences the health
of the people coming from a certain region,
community of grouping. The contribution
of education, income levels, consumption
patterns, and environment is crucial in this
aspect.
B. The value of health for the consumer/patient
or end-user is another aspect in analyzing
the economics of health care. This value