Health and Healthcare
Healthcare systems across Europe continue to face the challenge of delivering accessible quality healthcare at an affordable cost. Demands on public sector budgets are growing due to such factors as ageing populations, increased prevalence of chronic disease, rising expectations of patients and rapidly changing health technologies.
RAND Europe's Healthcare team is in a unique position through new appointments and collaborations to inform objective policymaking in the health field both in the UK and across Europe.
Areas of research include:
- evaluating the effectiveness of interventions to improve the quality and safety of healthcare delivery and practice,
- understanding how patients and providers respond to choices in healthcare delivery,
- quantifying public preferences and willingness to pay for improved service outcomes,
- developing an evidence base to inform R&D strategies in areas of health and biomedical research,
- informing consumer policy on lifestyle/health interventions.
More »Current Projects
DISMEVAL: Developing and validating DISease Management EVALuation — 20 October 2009
Chronic diseases are recognised as one of the greatest challenges facing health systems in the 21st century. Yet healthcare is still largely built around an acute, episodic model that is ill-suited to meet the often multiple needs of people with chronic conditions. Structured approaches to better manage chronic disease have been proposed as a means to improve care quality and reduce healthcare costs. Yet, the available evidence on the ability of such approaches to actually do so remains uncertain. This is in part because of a lack of universally accepted evaluation methods to measure the performance of such approaches that are both scientific and practicable. A new research project funded by the European Commission's Framework Programme 7 brings together ten partners in seven countries, led by RAND Europe, to identify and validate evaluation methods and performance measures for disease management in Europe and to make recommendations to policymakers, programme officials and other researchers.
www.dismeval.eu
More »Completed Research
Evaluating Grant Peer Review in the Health Sciences: A Review of the Literature — 31 August 2009
More than 95 percent of the £2 billion of public funding for medical research each year in the UK is allocated by peer review. Long viewed as a respected process of quality assurance for research, grant peer review has lately been criticised by a growing number of people as inefficient and structuraly flawed. This report presents the findings of a wide-ranging literature review to evaluate these criticisms and a short discussion of simple modifications that might help to address some of them.
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