>> The motivation for founding CINCH was to analyze competitive factors in healthcare markets and their impact on healthcare. Today, research includes the analysis of economic aspects in the context of mental health, inequality in the pandemic and regional differences.
Health economics is a sub-area of health services research that deals with the control and efficiency of the healthcare system and the economic determinants of health. The CINCH research center at the Faculty of Economics at the University of Duisburg-Essen is a network of research projects and groups at the university and additional university cooperation partners. In the area of health services research, the members of the CINCH are active in numerous research projects funded by the DFG and in the area of the innovation fund. CINCH has also been involved in the Leibniz Science Campus Ruhr since 2016. This combines the expertise of the RWI, the universities of Duisburg-Essen, Paderborn and Tilburg (NL) as well as the Vienna University of Economics and Business with a lively network of external partners (e.g. Techniker Krankenkasse). The projects examine regional differences, sustainable care and care for an aging population.

Research at CINCH is divided into several projects.
Prof. Jürgen Wasem and the team around the Risk Adjustment in Health Insurance project group focus on the interaction of the various compensation mechanisms used to measure morbidity in statutory health insurance, also in an international context.
The Empirical Health Care Management project (Jun.-Prof. Katharina Blankart) examines the effects of regulation in the healthcare market and the role of innovation. For example, Blankart, together with Daniel Avdic, PhD, analyzes the effects of economic regulations from the statutory health insurance associations. For this purpose, regional and temporal variation is used to examine the effects on doctors' compliance with the guidelines. The Chair of Medical Management also examines the framework conditions for managed competition in an international comparison.
Many experiments by the project groups Pay-for-Performance (Prof. Jeanette Brosig-Koch, University of Magdeburg) and Health Care Markets (Prof. Nadja Karies-Schwarz, University of Düsseldorf) are carried out in the Essen Laboratory for Experimental Economic Research (elfe). The laboratory is one of the world's best-equipped experimental laboratories for researching economic interaction. The experiments are also carried out with doctors in the field to increase external validity.
Demographic change and the ongoing corona pandemic are presenting healthcare systems with enormous challenges and bringing with them a number of profound changes. In order to address these changes, sustainable and healthy financing structures for social security systems are required. Research at CINCH makes a contribution to this by analyzing essential elements of health systems and examining their effects, if possible, on the basis of cause-and-effect analyses. This makes evidence-based policy recommendations possible, for which the CINCH researchers use current methods in the field of economic experiments and econometrics and use data close to health care.
But why food of all things? Well, as a large city in the center of the Ruhr area and the Rhine-Ruhr metropolitan region, Essen is in many respects an almost ideal location for a research center with this profile, which is quite unique for Germany. The existing competencies were bundled in this way, and the existing master's programs “Health Economics” and “Medical Management” were supplemented with CINCH by a concept of promoting young scientists. Since 2020, CINCH scientists have also been involved in national and international research initiatives to investigate the effects of the corona pandemic (e.g. long-term consequences of school closings, supply bottlenecks in the pharmaceutical market, financing of health systems).
Since its founding, CINCH members have published an average of more than 25 international publications per year. They have continued to generously supplement the funding from the BMBF with additional competitive third-party funding: more than one million euros per year have been raised from donors such as the DFG, the EIB Institute and the Leibniz Association; There are also a number of collaborations with various players in the healthcare system. Ultimately, the WISNA professorship, which was acquired in 2019 and dedicated to the labor market and health, made a significant contribution to the long-term sustainability of CINCH.
The positive overall result can be seen quite clearly in other indicators: On the one hand, the members of the CINCH take part in around 100 (inter)national conferences and meetings per year in order to create space for scientific and social discussions. An annual, internationally renowned conference on health economics issues also takes place in Essen. Workshops such as the “Essen Economics of Mental Health Workshop” are also organized. And since the beginning of the corona pandemic, CINCH has been offering the Essen Health Economics Seminar Series virtually.
On the other hand, it is a fact that many former CHINCH scientists have now been appointed to full professorships at other universities. Thirdly, as in previous years, Prof. Jürgen Wasem was included in the FAZ's “List of the Most Influential Economists” in 2021. Last but not least, in 2019, a professorship in the WISNA program funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research was successfully filled with Prof. Daniel Kühnle, who researches the topic of the labor market and health. And in 2018, Daniel Avdic, PhD, (now: Monash University, Australia) received the third prize of the German Business Prize of the Joachim Herz Foundation, worth 10,000 euros. <<

>> Why do you work at the institute?
The Chair of Medical Management, which is part of the CINCH research center, represents an exciting working environment with its interdisciplinary orientation, proximity to health policy and networking with actors and institutions in the health system. As a post-doc, this offers me an ideal framework for exchange to initiate research projects with other areas and implement them in a goal-oriented manner. In addition, as a link between the employees of various, thematically very different research projects, I can help achieve goals together, further develop skills through exchange and open up new fields of research.

In your opinion, what sets the chair apart?
The chair is characterized by the broad research activities of an interdisciplinary team in the areas of health economic evaluation, health services research, health technology assessment and health policy. New scientific findings and current health policy developments are also incorporated directly into teaching.
Under the leadership of Prof. Wasem, there is close collaboration between health economics, health services research and health policy. This is reflected, among other things, in the fact that the projects are carried out in the context of health services research in their entire range, from the identification and analysis of health care problems, the consideration of costs to the development of health policy strategies. In this way, they can make a significant contribution to improving the care of patients and the health of those insured by statutory health insurance. In addition, the high degree of networking with a wide variety of stakeholder groups in the health system helps to involve a wide variety of actors in research projects and to jointly achieve the implementation of the research projects. One example is the Eva-PT project, which is about the evaluation of the psychotherapy guidelines and their further development. Under the consortium leadership of the Chair of Medical Management, psychotherapist associations as well as health insurance companies are involved as consortium partners.

What topics and questions are you currently working on?
I am currently working on a wide range of topics in the areas of health economic evaluation and health services research. In the innovation fund-funded project OMPRISS, for example, we are carrying out an analysis of the cost-effectiveness of an online-based motivation program to reduce problematic media consumption in cases of Internet addiction. An example of a broad-based health services research project that I am currently working on is the Op-US project, which is also funded by the Innovation Fund. Here, questions about overuse and misuse of opioid-containing painkillers are examined using a mixed-methods approach. The perspectives of patients and service providers are taken into account. The focus is on long-term therapy for non-tumor-related pain, such as back pain. The results are intended to provide information as to whether there are certain groups of patients who are affected by overuse and/or incorrect care or by medication abuse. In addition, barriers and hurdles to guideline-compliant care are analyzed. For this purpose, survey and routine data are used and combined to obtain the most comprehensive picture of the care situation. On this basis, scenarios for health policy action strategies are developed.

What would you personally like to achieve with health services research?
On the one hand, I would like to present my research results in the scientific dis-
the course and contribute to thematic and methodological development. On the other hand, for me the focus of health care research is particularly on improving people's health care. The research results should help to build a bridge to the implementation of concrete measures beyond the identification and quantification of health care problems by developing health policy recommendations. As with the Op-US project, for example, I would like to investigate the extent to which there are supply deficits and analyze the reasons behind them in order to develop concrete suggestions for improvement based on these results. <<

>> Why are you doing research at CINCH?
The CINCH offers young scientists an interdisciplinary network of researchers. On the one hand, a constant exchange between different research areas leads to a wide range of methodological knowledge. On the other hand, this creates a culture of critically questioning and further developing one's own research.

What sets the CINCH apart?
The CINCH is characterized by a comprehensive international network, which is intensively maintained and expanded. Well-known researchers are invited to regular seminar series, with whom discussions take place on an equal footing. This serves as an early reflection of your own research in an international context and offers the opportunity to continually expand your own network.

What topics and questions are you currently working on?
As part of a project funded by German Cancer Aid, I am working on the connection between the certification of specialized cancer care and innovative action. Although both activities aim to improve care, different requirements represent a risk. Certification and innovation could hinder each other. Understanding how the two activities influence each other is the main goal of my research. The results should help to simultaneously implement certification and innovation in the interests of the patient, but also of the hospital, in order to improve the quality of care and use resources efficiently.

What would you personally like to achieve with health services research?
With my research, I would like to contribute to improving comprehensive care for cancer patients by providing new insights into how standardization and innovation can be reconciled. Regulatory decisions to improve cancer patients' access to high-quality care can only be made in the context of hospitals' strategic decisions. <<