HECON4250 – Cost and Efficiency Analyses of Health Care Providers

Course content

A central concept of performance is the cost efficiency of health care institutions, i.e. whether they could have produced the same services at a lower cost. Understanding the efficiency and cost structure of health care service production form the basis of payments to the providers. The course aims at introducing the student to advanced analyses of efficiency variation in service production, with particular emphasis on health care providers such as hospitals. The course will show how the basic concepts of the microeconomic theory of production are made applicable to empirical analysis of health care production. The course aims at introducing the methods and tools that are used in performance analysis in practice.

Learning outcome

Knowledge

You will know:

• The foundations and scope of cost and efficiency analyses
• How efficiency analyses can be used in formulation of public policy
• What information that are needed to do analyses
• Empirical methods that are in use in this area

Skills

You will learn:

• Production theory, incl. cost functions, efficiency and productivity concepts
• Stochastic frontier analysis (SFA)
• Data envelopment analysis (DEA) and Malmquist productivity index
• Statistical tools for analyzing costs, productivity and efficiency
• Empirical productivity analyses of hospital data

General competence

You will be able to:

• Understand the basis of cost and efficiency analysis of health care institutions
• Calculate efficiency and cost estimates based on provider data
• Discuss the relevance and limitations of empirical efficiency and performance measures

Admission to the course

This course is only available for students at the following master programmes:

Health Economics, Policy and Management (master's two years)

European Master in Health Economics and Management (master's two years)

Students who are admitted to study programmes at UiO must each semester register which courses and exams they wish to sign up for in Studentweb.

If you are not already enrolled as a student at UiO, please see our information about admission requirements and procedures.

Overlapping courses

• 5 credits overlap with HME4305 – Methods for the economic analysis of costs and demand in health care (discontinued).

Teaching

Lectures and PC lab.

Examination

Term paper.

Examination and grading at The Faculty of Medicine.

Language of examination

For students at Eu-HEM: English

For students at HEPAM: The problem set will be given in English. Answers can be given in Norwegian, Swedish, Danish or in English.

Grading scale

Grades are awarded on a scale from A to F, where A is the best grade and F is a fail. Read more about the grading system.

Resit an examination

For Eu-HEM students:

An EU-hem student cannot present her or himself for the examination in a course more than two times. There will be held re-sits for EU-hem students who have failed an exam or who have legitimate absence (usually illness) in January and August. If you are entitled to a re-sit you must contact the student advisor via email no longer than one week after the result of the exam has been published.

More about examinations at UiO

• Use of sources and citations
• Special exam arrangements due to individual needs
• Withdrawal from an exam
• Illness at exams / postponed exams
• Explanation of grades and appeals
• Resitting an exam
• Cheating/attempted cheating

You will find further guides and resources at the web page on examinations at UiO.