Comparing hospital cost efficiency between Norway and Finland

Improving the Efficiency of Health Care Spending

“…In a number of countries, private hospitals as providers of publicly funded services could help stimulate innovation, which may increase variation as a prelude to spreading best-practice. In the study by Linna et al (2006) quoted above, domestic variability in cost efficiency was found to be larger for Finnish hospitals than for Norwegian hospitals even though efficiency levels were higher. This evidence could be taken to indicate that despite being relatively efficient (on average) compared with Norwegian hospitals, some Finnish hospitals could become much more efficient by catching up to best performance.…”

“…the common version of the NordDRG system) --which to a large extent is inspired by the US HCFA-DRG system. Although each country uses a national version of the NordDRG in hospital reimbursements, reflecting specific institutional specificities, the common system could be utilised to draw inter-Nordic comparisons (see Linna et al, 2006).…”

“…• Another study compared Norwegian and Finnish hospitals based on aggregate output measures adjusted for the patient case-mix (Linna et al, 2006). 23 Norwegian hospitals were found to be less (cost) efficient than Finnish hospitals (Figure 4, panel B).…”

Five-Year Trend Analysis of Capacity Utilization Measures in a Teaching Hospital 2008-2012

“…Over the last few decades, there has been a growing interest in evaluating the performance of different health care organizations (1). Public hospitals have become the center of attention, as they play the key role in delivering medical services to the community, let alone consuming up to half of the total health care expenditures (2,3).…”

“…Accordingly, health care professionals need to act more efficiently in allocating scarce resources (4,5). In healthcare systems, the nature of outputs differs from other organizations, thus evaluating performance and measuring efficiency in health care are more difficult, and there is disagreement regarding the best approaches (1,6). Nonetheless, measuring hospital performance can be useful for stakeholders, including managers who evaluate the hospital's current status and monitor its activities over time, clients who must choose between different health care providers, providers who improve the quality of their health services to attract more consumers, and finally policymakers who establish more efficient mechanisms for allocating scarce resources (7).…”