Health that counts? Costs and hospital rates in the French hospital policy

What is a profitable patient? What is an excessively costly patient? How do we judge that a hospital is not productive enough? How do some hospitals end up in virtual bankruptcy? What effects do these financial situations have on the quality of care provided? How can economic instruments define health practices? These are the issues addressed by Pierre-André Juven in this book who focuses on the management implementation process developed in public hospitals since the 1980s, and in the forms of criticisms stemming from these evolutions.

He simultaneously explores the daily use of the instruments of quantification in the hospital, the history of these instruments and the controversies they tend to create. The program of medicalization of information systems, the national costs study, the points of synthetic index of activity and the activity-based tariffs are studied in the multiple sites where they are deployed. Through an accurate analysis of these objects, the book invites to both a political sociology of costs and a study of the forms of managerial activism.

2016 – Presses Universitaires de France

Language: French