Health Economics - EGS

The health economics section provides education, conducts research and contributes to valorisation.

The education consists of a contribution to the Bachelor's program in Health Sciences, Health & Life, the Health Policy specialization within the Master's program in Health Sciences (including pre-Master's), and post-academic education aimed at health care policy makers.

The section's research focuses on health economic issues that contribute to the public goals of Dutch healthcare: quality, accessibility and affordability. Due to the importance of the institutional context, the research is often interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary in nature. That is why the section contains researchers from a wide range of disciplines and collaborates with researchers from other departments and faculties, for example in the Talma Institute of VU University Amsterdam.

Read more about our employees.

Finance of healthcare

Healthcare in the Netherlands has three public system goals: quality, accessibility, and affordability. The financing and market organization of care serve this optimization. Because the characteristics of healthcare supply and demand vary greatly between different parts of healthcare, the financing and market organization also differ. This has led to a variety of financing models for financing and four system laws for market organization: Zvw, Wlz, Youth Act, and the Wmo.
Within the theme of "finance of healthcare", the effects of various financial incentives on the system goals are investigated, taking into account the way the market is organized. The research in this group is funded from the first funding stream (OCW), the second funding stream (ZonMw), and the third funding stream (healthcare providers-insurers). This theme falls directly under Xander Koolman.
Appropriate Care

In the theme of "Appropriate Care", the central question is what the obstacles are to making the choice for appropriate care the natural choice for patients, healthcare providers, healthcare providers on the one hand, and insurers, government and other stakeholders on the other. We conduct this research with "health economics" as a theoretical starting point, but we explicitly broaden it with insights from various different disciplines (medicine, health sciences, psychology, organizational sciences, sociology, public administration, law). We analyze issues from both the system world and the life world to gain a good understanding of the barriers to providing appropriate care from various stakeholder perspectives. For this purpose, we use analysis methods and frameworks that touch both behavioral health economics and institutional economics. In this way, we want to make our research both approachable and applicable to a broad audience of academia and practice, and within the latter for both policy makers and healthcare providers.
Long-term care

Members of the health economics section have been researching access to long-term care for many years. This involves the development of research tools and algorithms for the Care Assessment Center (CIZ), research into determinants of access, practice variation, costs and effects of different forms of care, and the effects of the Corona crisis on access to care. France Portrait is responsible for this line of research. For more information, you can contact France Portrait.
Formal and informal care

The majority of elderly care is provided in an informal setting. In many cases, it involves caregiver support delivered by loved ones. In addition, volunteer work is increasingly playing a significant role. We do not see caregiving as volunteer work but as care that arises from the relationship between the caregiver and the patient. This care is therefore often experienced as a personal duty. From the healthcare system perspective, caregiver support and volunteer work can be encouraged. The interaction between volunteer work and formal care can also be improved, so that the future care needs of those who need it the most can be met.
However, the current system contains numerous barriers to initiate this movement. These barriers sometimes have to do with the culture within the care sector itself, the existence of financial barriers between sub-sectors, or the requirements imposed on healthcare providers in terms of their accountability. Sometimes, these barriers are in other areas, such as labor law or the pension system. The barriers exist not only for volunteers but also for (citizen)initiatives to combine care and well-being in neighborhoods. Research into these barriers is led by Marcel Canoy and Yvonne Krabbe-Alkemade. For more information, you can contact Yvonne Krabbe-Alkemade.