Controlling in Hungarian hospitals: History and key issues

Abstract

The aim of this review paper is to illustrate the areas of interest and the thinking of Hungarian hospital managers by providing a summary of the relevant Hungarian health care controlling literature and to give an introduction of potential research directions. The paper summarizes the “public discourse” and thinking on controlling, and simultaneously highlights the priorities of health care as well. The main range of interest are the financing problems and their solutions, as well as other kind of uncertainty arising from the continuous changes in roles and measures. In the early ninties some health care institutions started to apply controlling systems as a result of the introduction of performance-based financing and often published articles about it up to 2004. In 2015, a project created to enhance the operational efficiency of the health care system restarted controlling thinking: unified management measures required for hospitals may induce the development of the controlling data service, more accurate reporting, management attention, and experience sharing.

Possibilities and limits of modelling of long-range economic consequences of air pollution – A case study

“…A crucial step in the determination of health care costs has been the calculation of treatment costs of different diseases. This was an extremely difficult task, as the current Hungarian health care monitoring system is not able to provide the necessary data [ 81 ]. Therefore, we applied a successive strategy to estimate the costs of treatment: (1) When data for Hungary were available in the literature, we adopted them, but converted the original data to 2019 price levels, taking into consideration the official rates of inflation of the Hungarian National Bank (MNB, 2013).…”

Hibrid a jövő minden területen? : Avagy az egészségügyi vezetőket is orvosszakmai végzettségű controller fogja támogatni?

“…A rendszer viszont nagyon gyakran formális marad, aminek Baran (2013) többek között a következő okokat tulajdonította: az integrált informatikai rendszerek elmaradottak, a dolgozók tudása és a menedzsment információja hiányos, valamint alacsony a közfinanszírozás. A hazai kórházi controllingrendszert egy korábbi szakirodalmi áttekintésben (Krenyácz, 2018a) részletesen bemutattam, de a legfontosabb ismérveket kiemelem. A leghangsúlyosabb a pénzügyi szemlélet, melynek középpontjában a likviditás és adósságkezelés áll, legfontosabb feladatának pedig az ellátásért elérhető finanszírozás maximalizálását és a szállítói állományok optimalizálását tekinti.…”

“…Korábbi kutatásaim alkalmával a hazai egészségügyi controllingrendszereket vizsgáltam meg (Krenyácz, 2015(Krenyácz, , 2017(Krenyácz, , 2018a, melyekben a controller munkáját is érintettem, de nem fejtettem ki bővebben funkcióját, szerepét és elfogadottságát. A hazai controllingkutatás szerint (Szukits, 2016) a vezetők inkább a számok előállítójaként tekintenek a controllerre, igaz ez az egészségügyben is.…”

Do budget constraints limit access to health care? Evidence from PCI treatments in Hungary

“…Until the late 2000s, most hospitals were maintained by local governments. Starting in 2010, ownership was gradually transferred to the central state, with a new supervising agency established in 2012(Hajnal & Rosta, 2016) Recent qualitative research(Krenyácz, 2017), however, showed that centralization has not resulted in stricter adherence to budgetary limits.3 At least, not in the area of AMI care, or emergency care in general. Some specialties, like gynecology or elective surgical care, are operated as a mixture of private and public care, and may also be characterized by informal payments, where personal gains of physicians may also come into play.…”