Billing And Insurance-Related Administrative Costs: A Cross-National Analysis.

Billing and insurance-related costs are a significant source of wasteful health care spending in Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development nations, but these administrative burdens vary across national systems. We executed a microlevel accounting of these costs in different national settings at six provider locations in five nations (Australia, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, and Singapore) that supplements our prior study measuring the costs in the US. We found that billing and insurance-related costs for inpatient bills range from a low of $6 in Canada to a high of $215 in the US for an inpatient surgical bill (purchasing power parity adjusted).

A realist evaluation of value-based care delivery in home care: The influence of actors, autonomy and accountability.

The increasing demand for home care is occurring in tandem with the need for governments to contain health care costs, maximize appropriate resource utilization and respond to patient preferences for where they receive care. We describe the evaluation of the Integrated Client Care Project (ICCP), a government funded project designed to improve value for outcomes for patients referred to community wound care services in Ontario, Canada. We applied a realist evaluation methodology in order to unpack the influences of contextual and mechanistic choices on the intended outcomes of the ICCP implementation.

Improving the patient experience through design.

Toronto's Princess Margaret Hospital (PMH) received a major financial gift to redesign its chemotherapy daycare and transfusion facilities, which were over capacity and in need of improvement, both functionally and aesthetically. PMH's vision was to create a new space and experience that was truly patient centric and world class. Meanwhile, a research team at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management had also received a gift from a corporate donor with a patient-focused mandate to examine ways in which healthcare in Canada could be made more patient centric.

Leading Lean: a Canadian healthcare leader's guide.

Canadian healthcare organizations are increasingly asked to do more with less, and too often this has resulted in demands on staff to simply work harder and longer. Lean methodologies, originating from Japanese industrial organizations and most notably Toyota, offer an alternative - tried and tested approaches to working smarter. Lean, with its systematic approaches to reducing waste, has found its way to Canadian healthcare organizations with promising results.