PROJECT OVERVIEW

Health care expenditure absorbs a large share of public resources and is growing fast in many European countries. The drivers of this growth go beyond demographic factors and have not been properly investigated until recently due to the lack of good quality data following the population of health service users for a sufficient number of years. The PoS research project aims to fill this gap in the knowledge by applying state-of-the-art econometric models to a very rich dataset on the population of Danish patients. The overarching hypothesis investigated by PoS is that a severe health shock, such as a stroke, AMI, hip fracture, is likely to leave a permanent mark on the ability of the individual to take care of herself and overcome the next episode, including completely unrelated episodes and small episodes of illness that were previously resolved without the need of a hospital visit. The remarkable success of new technologies and medical practices in extending the life expectancy of high-risk patients over the past decades might have increased the population of frequent users of the health system who were unlikely to survive a health shock in the past. The main objective of PoS is to investigate the impact of such a “survival effect” on the rapid growth of the demand of health care services. The main objective is articulated in three research questions:

 

R1: What is the impact of improving patient survival on subsequent costs of care?

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R2: Is the impact of the survival effect different according to patient’s characteristics?

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R3: To what extent can primary care reduce the use and costs of emergency secondary care?