Our research aims to contribute with increased knowledge on how to make our health service more efficient and more fair. Our academic staff includes three full time professors, four adjunct professors and four PhD students. Our research covers a wide range of topics and methods.
1: Health economics and priority setting
How can politically determined prioritization criteria be applied in practice? How can we improve the methods for calculating utility, resources, and severity?
2: Regional variations in healthcare utilisation
What can explain regional variations in treatments? How much of this is due to variations in morbidity, and how much is 'unjustified variation'?
3: Measuring health outcomes: Patient reported outcome measures (PROMs) and QALYs
The healthcare sector is increasingly concerned with developing and using various quality indicators, as well as implementing quality registries and patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs). How can we improve the methods used to measure health-related quality of life?
4: Health inequalities
Using data from the Tromsø Study, we are interested in how inequalities in a family's social and economic conditions during childhood affect health and well-being in adulthood. We examine how much of the observed health inequalities are due to different opportunities and how much is due to differences in people's health-related behaviors.
5. Impact evaluation using registry data
Based on large registry data (Norwegian Patient Registry), we answer questionsl like: What is the impact of diseases on ability to work? What is the effect of policy reforms and changes in reimbursements on the consumption of health services? How do hospitals and municipalities react to changes in the financial incentives in health – for instance, changes in the fee the municipality has to pay for patients who have to stay in hospital when they are ready to be discharged.
For more detailed descriptions of the various research projects, please visit the page of each individual researcher.
