Provider Payment Symposium

Provider Payment Symposium: How to Do it? Who Has Done it Well?

An iHEA pre-congress symposium

This symposium workshop is one devoted to help transition economy countries design, manage and implement reforms related to strategic purchasing with an emphasis on changing their provider payment systems. It will present a mix of sessions on "how to do it" through tutorials using newly-developed provider payment manuals, and blended with "real-life" case studies of countries in East Asia looking at both design and implementation of new payment systems.

The focus, then, is helping countries understand how to pay providers and how to design, build, and run new provider payment systems. It will have sessions on the most popular provider payment systems: primary care per capita (capitation) payment, cased-based hospital payment, and hospital global budgets. These systems have been widely adopted in Western Europe and across the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries generally, and are increasingly being adopted in developing countries, both low- and middle-income, as well as in transition economies such as the new member states of the European Union (EU).

The workshop furthers provides a tutorial for designing, launching, and running a health management information system, the necessary infrastructure for strategic purchasing and for enabling and fully completing the new provider payment systems.

The workshop can provide step-by-step guidelines for developing appropriate and effective payment systems for health purchasers, with a special focus on middle-income countries. In order to allow for adaptation to different contextual factors within and outside the health care system in different countries, the workshop provides guidance for a range of options, from the simplest to more complex systems.

Finally, the workshop will provide a platform for assessing case studies of implementation of provider payment systems from Australia, Singapore, Taiwan, and Japan. This will help participants better integrate models and manuals with approaches to needed modifications within economic and political-economy constraints.