HealthBASKET – Health benefits and service costs in Europe

Programme: Sixth Framework Programme (FP6)
Project Status: COMPLETED (April 2004 – March 2007)


What aims and scope

To address needs of knowledge related to comparisons and definitions of available health services across European Union Member States and develop methodologies to assess costs and prices of individual services in those regions. 

How it became possible 

To achieve the objectives above, the consortium undertook a series of different actions, including:

  • Collecting and describing how different countries define the services provided within the system by analysing both the structure and contents of benefit “catalogues” (or “baskets”) and the process of defining these benefit catalogues
  • Exploring the possibilities of building a European taxonomy of benefits–based on that analysis and other relevant classifications–to enable a common language for cost comparisons
  • Reviewing methodologies used to assess costs and prices of services across countries and identify best practices in analysing costs at the micro level within the scope of international comparability
  • Evaluating cost variations among and within countries, using a selection of “case-vignettes” that represent needs for care in both in-patient and outpatient settings.
  • Identifying what data is required to engage in meaningful international comparisons

Where EHMA delivered

 

Funding
EU logoThis project received funding from the European Commission within the Sixth Framework Research Programme (Grant: SP21-CT-2004-501588). This page and the publications contained herein only reflect the author’s views. The European Union is not liable for any use that might be made of the information contained in this page and publications.

WHY YOU WILL BENEFIT

The HealthBASKET project has provided the first in-depth analysis of the benefit baskets and the benefit catalogues in nine European countries, representing a heterogeneous mix of health systems. 

Country studies have shown that information on this issue is often difficult to access since it is highly fragmented and non-systematic. Using a common framework and terminology to scan the different health systems in searching for benefit catalogues has allowed for heterogeneous information to be collected in a highly comparative manner. 

The methodology followed in our study could be applied to explore and describe the health baskets and catalogues in other European (as well as non-European) countries. Policy recommendations are present within the document. 

The report is also available in French, German, Italian, Polish and Spanish.

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Prof. Sandra C. Buttigieg, University of Malta, Malta

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