GRK 2805:  Managerial and economic dimensions of health care quality

• Subject Area: Economics ; Medicine
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 462030795

Over the past two decades, the quality of health care has taken second place to the aim of cost containment, failing to receive sufficient attention from researchers or policy makers - a situation that has been further exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. To help change this, our Research Training Group in health economics aims to systematically generate evidence on how interactions among the three main groups of stakeholders in health care - payers, providers and patients/service users - affect the quality of care. To provide a view of quality of care that is as comprehensive as possible, our research agenda will focus on the relationship between processes and outcomes in a range of contexts, including provider cooperation, patient-physician interactions, and provider responses to incentives set by third-party payers or the government. PhD-students will acquire the skills needed to analyze the quality of care from a health economic perspective. Their knowledge of economics or business administration will be activated, adjusted and brought to a higher level. In addition, PhD students will learn how to structure and organize their work, and how to write scientific papers and successfully publish. To this end, we will require PhD students to attend seven research-related courses, comprising three core courses to be attended by all PhD students, two methods electives, and two free electives designed to facilitate further specialization in methods or other specific topics. In addition, we will offer electives focusing on statistical software packages and training in complementary skills. The formal education will be augmented by their participation in internal workshops. Moreover, they will take part in international conferences and workshops, and will benefit from continual exchange with visiting researchers and the possibility to undertake research stays abroad. In doing so, our interdisciplinary group of health economists will draw upon backgrounds in economics, business administration and medicine and combine econometric, experimental and theoretical methods. The group of applicants, all core members of the Hamburg Center for Health Economics (HCHE), were chosen because of their long-standing and well-established cooperation with one another. All supervisors have extensive experience supervising PhD-students and teaching, and they have a strong track record of publishing the results of their research in high-ranked, international peer-reviewed economic and health economic journals. The interdisciplinary nature of our group, covering a broad range of relevant research fields, experience and methodological backgrounds, has created important synergies over the years, and will continue to do so in future. From our perspective, a research training group provides the optimal format for creating scientific impact and for satisfying the needs for well-trained health economists in the field of quality of health care.

• DFG Programme: Research Training Groups
• Applicant Institution: Universität Hamburg
• Spokesperson: Professor Dr. Tom Stargardt
• Participating Researchers: Professor Dr. Matthias Augustin; Privatdozentin Dr. Christine Blome; Professor Dr. André Hajek; Professorin Dr. Iris Kesternich; Professor Dr. Mathias Kifmann; Professorin Dr. Johanna Kokot; Professor Dr. Hans-Helmut König; Professor Dr. Jonas Schreyögg; Professor Dr. Martin Spindler; Professorin Dr. Petra Steinorth; Professorin Dr. Eva Wild