The healthcare sector is facing profound changes, presenting diverse opportunities within this labor-intensive service industry. Our goal is to document these potentials in research and education and evaluate the quality and cost-effectiveness of innovative healthcare delivery methods. The institute aims to contribute to shaping the healthcare industry through the application of health economics tools, considering the individual actors in the healthcare system, their objectives, and their interactions in our research.

Health economic research generally focuses on the following questions:

• Production: How are healthcare goods produced?
• Allocation: Which healthcare goods are utilized?
• Distribution: How are healthcare goods distributed?

Based on these considerations, the research concept of the Institute for Health Economics and Medical Management is divided into the following four areas:

Health Economics

• Decision theory
• Utility theory
• Behavioral theory
• Theory of incomplete contracts (property rights, transaction cost theory)
• Welfare theory
• Game theory
• Theory of market failure and government failure

Health System Research

• Healthcare economics: Trend and market analyses, innovation fields
• Demography, morbidity, and expenditure development
• Financing of healthcare services: Options for resource mobilization reform
• Organization of healthcare delivery: Options for resource utilization reform - Managed Care and Integrated Care
• International healthcare system comparison: Comparing state, market-based healthcare systems, and social insurance systems
• Simulation of healthcare systems and evidence-based healthcare policy (multi-agent models and cybernetic simulation)

Health Services Research

• Demand and reimbursement: Morbidity-based physician demand and innovative reimbursement instruments (Capitation, DRGs, risk adjustment)
• Healthcare management: Disease Management, Case Management, Utilization Management, and Quality Management
• Innovative healthcare delivery methods: Use of information and communication technologies in healthcare (eHealth, electronic patient records, eMonitoring)
• Hospital management: Outsourcing, admission and discharge management, cost-effectiveness analyses

Evaluation Research

• Health economic evaluation and cost-effectiveness analyses: Disease cost, cost-benefit, cost-effectiveness, cost-utility studies
• Decision analysis in healthcare: Modeling disease models with the help of software-based decision systems (Data TreeAge)
• Evaluation of care programs: Patient and employee satisfaction, customer retention, customer loyalty, efficiency studies (Data Envelopment Analysis)
• Quality of life: Measurement and assessment
• Business valuation methods: return on investment, total value of ownership, total cost of ownership, real options