Allocating Funds for Health Care to Manitoba Regional Health Authorities

Making decisions about how to allocate funds for health care is a common responsibility for governments in publicly funded health care systems. Resources are scarce so decisions need to be made as to how best to distribute them. The work presented here was initiated as a result of a research project that was designed to develop a funding allocation methodology for healthcare in Manitoba, Canada. The primary focus was to how to best meet the healthcare needs of populations living in different regions, based on their health status. The principle of equity suggests that those with more need will require more healthcare services and funding for those services. A method of allocating healthcare funds most equitably is proposed for hospital care, home care, and nursing homes using administrative healthcare data and other data on the health status of populations. The proposed “Manitoba approach to funding allocation” (described in the first paper) was developed specifically to address issues within the province, and may be generalized to other jurisdictions, but as is demonstrated in the second paper, there are many ways that others have looked at it. The third paper addresses a need to publish in the academic literature an approach to assigning healthcare costs to administrative data. Taken together, these papers provide readers with insights into, and tools for, making decisions regarding funding allocation for healthcare.