Study On Influence Factors Of The Health Care Expenditure And The Countermeasures

The rapid increase of health expenditure has caused much concern all over the world, and it has already been the focus of the Chinese government. It is an urgent task to study and find useful strategies which could control the rapid increase of health expenditure.This study aimed to analyze the influence factors of the increase of health expenditure of Shandong province based on the analyses of health service pathways in hospitals and to put forward suggestions to control the increase of health care costs.Data sources of this study included literature review, investigation of hospital staffs, out-patients and in-patients. Literature review analyzed the national policies and the health expenditure of Shandong province to find the main factors influencing the increase of health expenditure; survey questionnaires were used to find out hospital managing and service procedure status based on the views of hospital staffs and the medical expenses and quality of hospital service according to the investigation of in-patients and out-patients. Logistic stepwise regression was used to analyze the impact on Shandong' health expenditure; percent, mean, standard deviation and T-test were used to describe and analyze the procedure.Results showed that the increase of Shandong's health expenditure was greater than that of the GDP and the residents' disposable income in the corresponding period; and the unreasonable allocation of health resources resulted in structure health expenditure increment. Multi-factor analysis indicated that there were two factors contributing much more to the increase, one was the rapid increase of the GDP, the other was the increase of human labor costs. The analysis of satisfaction and survey showed there were many problems in hospital service procedure. The problems of management procedure focused on the implementing power of functional and operational offices. Because of unreasonable procedure in-patient and out-patient care, patients spent more time on nonmedical activities compared to medical treatment. This study suggested there were two key technologies to control health expense increase. One was to strengthen healthcare system reform and to construct health insurance policy and related policies. The other was to optimize hospital management procedure and service procedure.The main contributions of this study lie in: 1. it is useful to clearly understand the emphasis of health economics policy and expense control mechanism from a broad perspective; 2. it is helpful to promote hospital connotation construction, use present resources efficiently and allocate resources reasonably, decrease hospital cost, improve management efficiency and control medical expenses; 3. it is useful to improve hospital core competition. Hospital could improve assets management benefit and competition power only under the condition of paying much attention to social benefit and following correct management direction, strengthening economic management and cost control.