How to set challenging goals and conduct fair evaluation in regional public health systems. Insights from Valencia and Tuscany Regions

Milena Vainieri, Federico Vola, Gregorio Gomez Soriano and Sabina Nuti

Health Policy, 2016, vol. 120, issue 11, 1270-1278

Abstract: The definition of “the right targets” and the way the evaluation of results is performed affect the willingness to commit to new challenges, which is a factor that influences the relationship between goal setting and performance results. Indeed, some authors claim that the choice of an inappropriate goal-setting procedure is a major cause of failure of management control systems. Goal setting theorists found that assigning a specific and challenging goal leads to higher performance than (a) an easy goal, (b) a general goal or (c) no goal setting. Despite this evidence, yet, few proposals concern the definition of what is “challenging”. This paper focuses on two issues: (a) what is to be considered a challenging goal and (b) what is a “fair evaluation” in the health care sector. This work suggests that benchmarking is a valid support to solve the previous dilemmas. Relying on two Regional European advanced experiences – Valencia in Spain and Tuscany in Italy –, this paper aims to provide conceptual methods that can help managers define challenging goals and conduct fair evaluation about their achievement. Although these Regions adopted different governance models, both of them applied very similar techniques, which seem to be associated to an improvement of their performance and a reduction of unwarranted variation.

Keywords: Incentives; Targets; Health care sector; Benchmarking (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016885101630241X
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:hepoli:v:120:y:2016:i:11:p:1270-1278

DOI: 10.1016/j.healthpol.2016.09.011

Access Statistics for this article

Health Policy is currently edited by Katrien Kesteloot, Mia Defever and Irina Cleemput

More articles in Health Policy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu () and ().