Performance of public and private hospital systems

Commissioned study

This study is completed. The final research report was released on 10 December 2009.

The Australian Government asked the Productivity Commission to examine and report on the relative performance of the public and private hospital systems, and related data issues. As part of the study, the Commission was requested to consider:

comparative hospital and medical costs for clinically similar procedures performed by public and private hospitals
the rate of hospital-acquired infections by type, reported by public and private hospitals
rates of fully-informed financial consent by privately-insured patients, out-of-pocket expenses for patients who do not give such consent, and best-practice examples where fully-informed financial consent is provided for every procedure
other relevant performance indicators, including the ability of such indicators to inform comparisons of hospital performance and efficiency.

If any of the above tasks prove not fully possible because of conceptual problems or data limitations, the Commission was to propose developments to improve the feasibility of future comparisons.

The Commission was also asked to advise the Government on the most appropriate indexation factor for the Medicare Levy Surcharge thresholds.