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Does pooling health & social care budgets reduce hospital use and lower costs?

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  • Stokes, Jonathan
  • Lau, Yiu-Shing
  • Kristensen, Søren Rud
  • Sutton, Matt

Abstract

An increasing burden of chronic disease and multimorbidity has prompted experimentation with new models of care delivery that aim to improve integration across sectors and reduce overall costs through decreased use of secondary care. One approach to stimulate this change is to pool health and social care budgets to incentivise care delivery in the most efficient location. The Better Care Fund is a large pooled funding initiative gradually taken up by local areas in England between 2014 and 2015. We exploit this variation in timing of uptake to examine the short- (1 year) and intermediate-term (up to 2 years) effects of the Better Care Fund on seven measures of hospital use and costs from a cohort of 14.4 million patients constructed using national Hospital Episode Statistics. We test for differential effects on people with multimorbidity. We find no effects of budget pooling on secondary care use for the whole population. For multimorbid patients the use of bed days increased in the short-term by 0.164 (4.9%) per patient per year. In the short-to intermediate-term, pooling health and social care budgets does not reduce hospital use nor costs. However, pooling funds does appear to stimulate additional integration activity.

Suggested Citation

  • Stokes, Jonathan & Lau, Yiu-Shing & Kristensen, Søren Rud & Sutton, Matt, 2019. "Does pooling health & social care budgets reduce hospital use and lower costs?," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 232(C), pages 382-388.
  • Handle: RePEc:eee:socmed:v:232:y:2019:i:c:p:382-388
    DOI: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2019.05.038
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    1. Stokes, Jonathan & Struckmann, Verena & Kristensen, Søren Rud & Fuchs, Sabine & van Ginneken, Ewout & Tsiachristas, Apostolos & Rutten van Mölken, Maureen & Sutton, Matt, 2018. "Towards incentivising integration: A typology of payments for integrated care," Health Policy, Elsevier, vol. 122(9), pages 963-969.
    2. Jonathan Stokes & Maria Panagioti & Rahul Alam & Kath Checkland & Sudeh Cheraghi-Sohi & Peter Bower, 2015. "Effectiveness of Case Management for 'At Risk' Patients in Primary Care: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 10(7), pages 1-42, July.
    3. Goodman-Bacon, Andrew, 2021. "Difference-in-differences with variation in treatment timing," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 225(2), pages 254-277.
    4. Sergio Correia, 2016. "reghdfe: Estimating linear models with multi-way fixed effects," 2016 Stata Conference 24, Stata Users Group.
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    Cited by:

    1. Francesco Longo & Karl Claxton & Stephen Martin & James Lomas, 2023. "More long‐term care for better healthcare and vice versa: investigating the mortality effects of interactions between these public sectors," Fiscal Studies, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 44(2), pages 189-216, June.
    2. Looman, Willemijn & Struckmann, Verena & Köppen, Julia & Baltaxe, Erik & Czypionka, Thomas & Huic, Mirjana & Pitter, Janos & Ruths, Sabine & Stokes, Jonathan & Bal, Roland & Rutten-van Mölken, Maureen, 2021. "Drivers of successful implementation of integrated care for multi-morbidity: Mechanisms identified in 17 case studies from 8 European countries," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 277(C).
    3. Stoop, Annerieke & de Bruin, Simone R. & Wistow, Gerald & Billings, Jenny & Ruppe, Georg & Leichsenring, Kai & Obermann, Konrad & Baan, Caroline A. & Nijpels, Giel, 2019. "Exploring improvement plans of fourteen European integrated care sites for older people with complex needs," Health Policy, Elsevier, vol. 123(12), pages 1135-1154.
    4. Alonso, José M. & Andrews, Rhys, 2022. "Does vertical integration of health and social care organizations work? Evidence from Scotland," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 307(C).

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