About the project
Rising health care costs is a product of many different factors. There are many roads to cost containment and effective utilization of scarce resources. This project investigates physicians knowledge of costs and the role it plays in their decision-making process. As the street bureaucrats of the health care sector they are the final link in the decision chain resulting in patient treatment and are thus by law responsible to ration care to citizens.
Background
Questionnaire data collected by The Research Institute of the Norwegian Medical Association is analyzed to answer questions about physicians role in containing health care costs.
- Do physicians know the prices of treatments they offer their patients?
- Are they interested in acquiring knowledge about the cost of care?
- Are they willing to use price as a decision factor when they treat patients?
- Are there differences between age-groups, genders, geographies, or specialties in the level of knowledge of prices and attitudes towards using price as decision factor in treatment?
Financing
The PhD project is financed by Accenture and The Research Council of Norway under the Industrial Ph.D. scheme.
Cooperation
- Accenture
- The Research Council of Norway
- The Research Institute of the Norwegian Medical Association
Publications
- Eriksen, Ida Iren (2012). Fastlegens kunnskaper og holdninger til kostnader i: Hans Olav Melberg & Lars Erik Kjekshus (red.), Fremtidens Helse-Norge. Fagbokforlaget.