Projects

Limited public resources and the challenge of taking appropriate account of the tension between ethics and economics place high demands on management and organizational development in the healthcare sector. From an economic perspective, it is obvious that the design of processes and structures should be geared to the "added value" they provide. However, what exactly "added value" means for patients, contributors and other important stakeholders in the German health care system, how this added value can be measured, and through which structures and processes its implementation can be effectively promoted, is in various respects an open question. The department addresses this question through empirical and theoretical research at three levels:

    Specification of added value: goal-oriented management in health care requires a concept of "added value" - for example, to determine the "unique selling proposition" of a new health care good in a business plan or its "value-based pricing". However, the current concepts in this area conflict with social legislation and the ethical orientation in Germany, which is based on human dignity: Neither the orientation towards individual utility maximization (expressed in aggregate willingness to pay), which is common in economic circles, nor the maximization of quality-adjusted life years proposed by Anglo-Saxon health economics seem to offer a consensual specification of "added value" in the German health care system. The first research goal of the department is therefore to contribute to a theoretically sound, needs-based concept of "added value" in health care that can be operationalized for empirical research and that takes into account the relevant ethical and legal requirements.
    Evaluation (ex-ante and ex-post): The amount of added value of a new health service is rarely easy to determine given the high uncertainty regarding its costs and effects. This is exacerbated by the multiple actors who contribute to this added value from a system perspective and by the complex data structures of the German health care system, which make it difficult to measure.
  Evidence-based management, however, requires surveying the added value of new services at the beginning and during the innovation process.  The second research goal of the department is therefore the further development and application of empirical methods for the evaluation of new health care services accompanying innovations. Implementation: Value-added innovations can only benefit patients if their introduction succeeds with the help of appropriate organizational and contractual arrangements. A possible approach to this are, for example, so-called managed entry agreements, in which the remuneration of new services is linked to evidence of the actual added value generated. Such arrangements must take into account the context of the German health care system and the associated interests and incentive structures, and must be economically feasible in the long term. Due to the specifics of the statutory health insurance system, results from the international management literature on successful organizational development in the health care system can only be transferred to Germany to a limited extent. The third research objective is therefore to conduct context-specific theoretical and empirical research on innovation processes in the German health care system in order to promote the successful implementation of value-adding innovation in health care practice.