Abstract (English)
While rising costs of healthcare have put increased fiscal pressure on public finance, job growth in the health sector has had a stabilizing force on overall employment levels not least in times of economic crises. At the same time productivity of this growing health work force has not tapped its full potential yet. Policy measures have emerged that focus on enhancing the productivity of the health labor force through structural reform. New forms of better-aligned care models appear promising to improve efficiency and quality in the health system while addressing fractured service delivery. This fragmentation incre-asingly becomes a barrier to improved performance especially as chronic care demands are growing. The long-term stability of the health system will require new care delivery models that better utilize a growing health work force. We identified three aspects, which might be promising in this respect. First, greater leadership and good governance on the central government level seems to be a prerequisite to initiating consistent and strategic change of care delivery. Second, financial incentives are indispensable in order to promote multidisciplinary delivery models that re-define the roles of health professionals. Finally, care delivery likely fosters both quality and productivity when payment schemes are reformed towards bundled payments on the basis of episodes