Business Administration and Economics

Following the establishment in 2010 of paluno, the Ruhr Institute for Software Technology, the health economics research centre CINCH commenced its work in May 2012. This marked the creation of an internationally visible platform for the faculty’s many years of research expertise in the areas of medicine management and health economics.
Achieving efficient organisation of the healthcare system means striking a fine balance between the desire to provide high-quality medical care and the limits imposed by strict economic parameters. Whether competition is a suitable instrument for resolving these opposing objectives is one of a number of similar issues being investigated by two groups of junior scientists. The first group analyses competition within the healthcare industry empirically using advanced econometric techniques, focusing on regional competition between service providers and health insurance companies. The second group of junior scientists is looking at the preferences and behaviour of providers and consumers in healthcare markets using experimental methods – an entirely novel methodological approach in health economics research. The work of the young researchers is supplemented by three projects: one supervised by Professor Jürgen Wasem on refining the risk structure adjustment, one by ­Professor Jeannette Brosig-Koch’s Chair of Quantitative Economic Policy on pay-for-performance, and one by the Düsseldorf Institute for Competition Economics (DICE) investigating ­in-patient care. CINCH is headed by Professors Stefan Felder (Coordinator), Jürgen Wasem and Martin Karlsson. Here they collaborate closely with the RWI (Rhine-Westphalia Institute for Economic Research) in Essen and with DICE based at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf. CINCH has received initial funding for 4 years under the auspices of the funding initiative “Zentren der gesundheitsökonomischen Forschung” (Centres for Health Economics Research) from the Federal Ministry of Education and Research; the amount of funding is approximately 2 million euros.