Abstracts by key term: added value
Quality and benefit are also frequently used terms in the healthcare system, with which we emphasize that significant resources are used to ensure optimal “quality of care” and to create “benefits” for those affected. Examples are the proportion of medical manpower (approx. 20%) that is committed to quality assurance and the expenses that arise as part of the approval of medicines for the creation of benefit dossiers (approx. 1 million euros/dossier). Quality and benefit are are therefore used as different dimensions of added health value, whereby quality could be a necessary prerequisite for providing benefit, but benefit is not necessarily a prerequisite for quality. The increasing scarcity of resources in health systems requires not only the critical analysis of new expenditure, but also the justification of existing expenditure. The not insignificant expenditure on ensuring the quality and benefit of health services can no longer be accepted as an end in itself1. On the one hand, they must be subjected to a “clinical-economic” analysis, through which the effort and the returns achieved for patients and society are compared. In addition, the differentiated analysis of quality and benefit opens up new considerations for financing health services. In order to carry out this analysis, it is first necessary to describe what is meant by “quality” and “benefit” in the healthcare system.