Health Economics

Knowledge and understanding Students will understand the concepts of Performance, Performance Cycle, Performance Tree and Performance indicators in healthcare organizations. Students will also understand the meaning and the appropriate use of the main methods and indicators for monitoring the health of the population and the activities of the health services, such as occurrence measures (rates, ratios, proportions, person-years), adjustment methods (direct standardization, stratification, regression models), measures of association (Odds Ratios, Relative Risks), indicators of hospital activity (length of stay, occupancy rate, bed supply, turn over index), and graphic representation (targets, dashboards, spiecharts, treemaps). Finally, students will understand the rules of scientific writing for publication and they will understand how to allocate the portion of a written report to the appropriate section (Background, Methods, Results, Conclusion) Applying knowledge and understanding Students will be able to describe the main methods of Performance evaluation and to know which one is more suitable to the situation presented (Input, Process, Program, Output, Impact). They will be able to search for the appropriate information to describe a specific health context and to apply the appropriate method of analysis. They will be able to reproduce a structured abstract from a scientific article and to write a short report in the structured form (definition of the objective, data collection, selection of indicators, summary and presentation of results). Making judgement Students will acquire the ability of independent judgement on issues related to Performance evaluation in healthcare. Through the analysis of examples taken from the literature they will be able to choose the most appropriate Performance evaluation method to compare different geographical contexts, pre-defined objectives, and different organizational levels. Communication skills Students will have the ability to critically discuss examples of Performance evaluation systems used in healthcare. They will have the ability to simulate a congress speach by delivering to the classroom a Power Point presentation on a short health evaluation report. Learning skills Students will be able to apply descriptive and analytical statistics to analyze simple dataset and to report the results following the structured form of a scientific article.