Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
expenditure yield (Anderson and Frogner, 2008)? If more money is
spent on healthcare, this leaves less to be spent on other social
goods, so accurate assessment of the value per dollar of spending on
healthcare is a critical issue for social policy (Anderson and Frogner,
2008). For the whole of the OECD in 2005, 75 per cent of funding
for healthcare came from public sources (Anderson and Frogner,
2008). In some countries, this public expenditure covered their
entire populations, yet in the US, only 26.2 per cent of the population
was covered by public healthcare in 2005 (Anderson and Frogner,
2008). These statistics highlight how important it is to have an
accurate assessment of health expenditure and what it achieves.
Research on healthcare quality, however, has shown that high rates
of healthcare expenditure do not necessarily correlate with high value
healthcare (Anderson and Frogner, 2008). When using life expectancy
as a measure of the value of healthcare, for example, the US was
shown to have lower life expectancy than might be expected for the
amount of money spent on health (Anderson and Frogner, 2008).
OECD studies on 19 other indicators of health quality collected since
2001, however, show a more nuanced analysis than a simple life
expectancy measure might indicate (Anderson and Frogner, 2008).
Although the value per dollar of health expenditure in the US is
arguably very low, there are some measures in which the US emerges
well ahead of the rest of the OECD - examples include: cervical cancer
screening, survival rates for breast and colorectal cancer, measles
vaccination and smoking reduction (Anderson and Frogner, 2008).
A recent study by the World Health Organization reveals that of
the expenditure on healthcare across the OECD, the largest
proportion occurs in hospitals, with efficiency rates of between 80
and 88 per cent (Hsu, 2010). Improving efficiencies in the health
sector was thus identified by the World Health Report 2000 as one
important step in increasing the levels of access to healthcare
worldwide (Hsu, 2010). Consequently, the need for a reduction of
waste and more effective interventions should be a high priority for
all health providers (Hsu, 2010). Moreover, the currently high level
of inefficiency within the hospital system is used in this study to
support the argument for more evidence-based evaluations of how
efficiency might be improved (Hsu, 2010).
