Opening opportunities for multidisciplinary research on private health markets

CCR's research collaboration on studying competition in the private health care markets first started in 2013 with a 2-year project funded by Kela. Today, 9th peer-reviewed publication and 4th master’s thesis under preparation, three on-going PhD projects and 2 babies later this collaboration is going stronger than ever. Our research network has expanded to include health scientist and economists from Kela to TSE Economics, VATT, KKV and Aalto University and together we are once again preparing a new project plan for the up-coming years.

The mutual playground for our crew has been the exceptionally detailed and rich longitudinal data on private health care service use: it includes information on the procedures, users and expenditures linked to provider hierarchies at physician, practice and company level since year 2008 – with nearly 112 million observations. As our research has previously been limited to the private health care sector, in the next project the data will be expanded to cover occupational health care, public primary health care and public procurements as well. This allows us to build study designs to analyze the patient choices and substitution (or complementation) between different sectors, and more generally, to widen our perspective to the health care system as a whole and study private sector as a part of it.

This opens up new countless possibilities for multidisciplinary research. For example in studying service integration, private health care sector has not traditionally been taken into consideration even though it still is partially compensated by public funding. Especially for children private insurances are very common which leads to polarization and inequality between these groups. The data offers possibilities for several perspectives and disciplines to join the research crew and we are open for discussions.

Our previous studies on competition in the private health care markets have covered for example:
•    the exploration of the competitive environment and determinants of competitive advantage combining quantitative and qualitative methods;
•    analysis on the definitions of the relevant market and the transformation in the market structure;
•    studying the effect of market structure on prices in both static and dynamic setting;
•    analyzing the effect of mergers and acquisitions on prices and consumer responses;
•    studying the effects of two cases of innovative entrants disrupting the incumbent market;
•    studying the effects of release of two price comparison websites on prices and consumer choice.