Monitoring prioritization in a public health care sector

Abstract

This paper presents a new way to monitor priority settings in public health care systems. We take departure in medical guidelines prescribing acceptable waiting times for different medical descriptions. Allocating ICD10 codes to the medical descriptions, we are able to compare actual waiting times to the recommended maximum waiting times.This way we use the medical guidelines as a tool for monitoring prioritization in the health sector. In an application, using data from the Norwegian patient register (NPR), we test statistically for compliance with the guidelines. The results indicate some degree of over-prioritization for patients of lower priority relative to patients of higher priority