Project description
Primary care to reduce emergency admissions
Policies to improve primary care access may help prevent unplanned emergency admissions, which is placing a huge strain on healthcare resources in many European countries. To explore the factors resulting in increasing numbers of emergency admissions, the EU-funded PoS project will apply econometric models to an exceptionally comprehensive and longitudinal data set on the population of Danish patients. The project will investigate the long-term impact of improving patients’ survival and the extent to which primary care can reduce the use of secondary care. The findings, which will benefit new policies to manage the growing demand for emergency care, will identify the profile of patients most likely to use care after surviving an acute event.
Objective
Unplanned emergency admissions absorb a large share of the resources allocated to the Health System and are growing at a fast rate in many European countries. The drivers of this growth go beyond demographic factors and have not been properly investigated until recently due to the lack of rich longitudinal datasets following a large population of patients for many years and a gap in the transfer of knowledge between Economics and Public Health disciplines. My ambition is to fill this gap in the knowledge by applying state-of-the-art econometric models to an exceptionally comprehensive and longitudinal dataset on the population of Danish patients, thus offering a unique opportunity to inform new policies on the appropriate tools to manage the growing demand for emergency care and the financial sustainability of the Health System, and policies aiming at reducing hospital readmissions. Access to new data, knowledge and training at the Danish Centre for Health Economics in SDU will allow me to greatly advance and expand my stream of research and will have a remarkable impact on my career development.
The proposed research will address the following questions:
1. What is the long-term impact of improving patients' survival on subsequent use and costs of care?
2. To what extent can primary care reduce the use of secondary care following “the survival effect”?
3. To what extent can higher integration of care between acute and post-acute services reduce the use of secondary care following the survival effect?
4. Is the impact of the survival effect different according to patient’s socioeconomic characteristics? I will identify the profile of patients who are more likely to use care after surviving an acute event, and those who are more likely to benefit from primary care and integration of care interventions.
Fields of science
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
MSCA-IF-EF-ST - Standard EFCoordinator
5230 Odense M
Denmark