Essais sur la qualité des soins : approches en économie et en santé publique

This work takes the perspectives of economics and public health to study issues related to the quality of hospital care.The first chapter introduces the concept of quality of care in economics and public health. We show that the two fields use similar definitions of the concept but explore differing and complementary approaches towards its regulation.Fixed price competition between hospitals, as implemented by a prospective payment system, should lead to an improvement of care quality, provided that the demand for care is increasing with quality. The second chapter evaluates the sensitivity to quality of demand for hospital care in France, using ranking lists published by the lay media as a measure of information on quality available to potential patients. We estimate changes in hospital demand caused by ranking lists on a panel of hospitals located in the Paris area, for several pathologies. We find a sizeable and significant demand shift towards hospitals belonging to the top list in the forprofit sector for one pathology. No effect is observed for non-profit hospitals, or for other pathologies in the for profit sector. Competition for quality may thus not be a feasible regulation approach for French public hospitals.The third chapter provides evidence regarding the cost of hospital infection control strategies targeting antimicrobial resistant bacteria. We estimated the burden and costs associated with two types of strategies, relying on targeted screening or on general hygiene promotion strategies, in two multinational controlled clinical trials, in surgical and intensive care units.Our results highlight the variability of costs associated with broad, non-specific hygiene promotion interventions, and, for interventions which were found to be effective by the clinical trials, costs that are consistent with the hypothesis that these interventions are costeffective.