Health economics
Health economics is a branch of economics concerned with the formal comparison of costs and consequences of health care. One of the seminal papers in this field was written by Neuhauser and Lweicki, who in 1975 applied a rule of diminishing returns to predict that the cost per cancer death prevented by the sixth in a series of six repeated fecal occult blood tests exceeded one million dollars.Health economics uses mathematical models to synthesise data from biostatistics and epidemiology for support of medical decision making.
Since about 10 years health economics integrates the wider domain of strategic health management.
This dimension declines through the concepts of mastery of the depenses of health and management of the quality, It is about a step of systematization of procedures integrating at the same moment the problem of the profit of the patient, the motivation of the staff and the reduction of costs.
RECENT EVENTS
Since 2002, the global step of reduction of costs and optimization of resources became a legal constraint, an obligation for all the highly-rated corporations or unquoted in the stock exchange.
Everything began with the law SARBANNES-OXLEY in the United States in 2002 who returned compulsory internal control. From 2003, Canada and European Economic Community took measures aiming at identical objectives:
1- The realization and optimization of the operations of reduction of costs and management of the performance;
2- The reliability of the financial information of costs and performances;
3- Correspondence to laws and to current regulations, notably standards of management of the quality;
4- The implementation of the rules of good governance ÃÂÃÂto play collectiveÃÂÃÂ :
-Every individual member of the company contributes to his level of responsibility in the internal control;
-The responsibilities of the staff of frame vary according to hierarchical levels;
- The general manager assures ultimate responsibility; he is responsible for the system of internal control;
-The directors of the various units are responsible for the internal control bound to the objectives of this one;
-The financial executives and their teams play a role of dominating piloting: they follow and analyze performances, by report not only in objectives bound to financial information, but also to those bound to the operations of the company and to the legal obligations.
These measures which impose the internal coherence as base of the management put company in front of a major technological challenge: the integration of their system of internal control.
Internal control directed towards ÃÂÃÂrealization and optimization of the operations of reduction of costs and management of the performance" gets organized indeed around the notion of inductors of costs, the unforeseen phenomenon, the abnormality or the dysfunction which provokes an increase of costs. By opposition the inductor of activity is the event which activates the activity of the company.
To understand difficulty recovering, it is necessary remember yourself that the most known methods of management arise from the cost accounting which depends on the financial accounting itself. So very wide-spread methods such as the ABC (ACTIVITY-BASED COSTING), the ABM (ACTIVITY-BASED MANAGEMENT), ÃÂÃÂCost killerÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂ, etc., rest on the inductor of activity and not on the inductor of costs.
It is only very recently that multi-field searches in management drove to the normalization of the inductor of costs and to its standardization through the new technologies of information and the communication.
== See :
- Internal control
- Integration of the internal control