Benchmarking Regional Health Management II (Ben RHM II) ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ As such, they can be a starting and endpoint of the health policy cycle: in the beginning, to set up health plans and organise health management systems – as shown in the case study (chap- ter 7.2) – and then later on to evaluate existing health management systems. The reference frameworks in general provide a good possibility for orientation. They are, however, not suited for the exclusive conduct of evaluations. Due to our research results it is urgently recommended to further improve the collec- tion of health-relevant data at the regional level so that not only data at the national level but also at the regional level are comparable with each other. This would be beneficial to all par- ticipating regions in that they could carry out their own interregional comparisons in addition to regional comparisons. It can in general be stated, that without regional health performance indicators no efficient and effective health policy can be implemented. It is however not suffi- cient to only compare indicators. Our project has further shown that clustering is a good tool to compare regions meaningfully. At the same time it has to be stated that the clustering method used for this research project is well suited for application and recommended for other projects. Under this project a clustering method was developed and used for working on the results obtained. The method can be used for other research projects and be further improved. The “Benchmarking Regional Health Management II (Ben RHM II)” project shows political decision makers various successful fields of action for the implementation of relevant measures for the health management of the three tracers. Finally it has to be said that due to these different results obtained from the organigraphs, in depth-interviews, health performance indicators and reference frameworks first important steps towards comprehensive benchmarking in health management could be taken. Even if “good practice“ examples could be established (e.g. the regions Szabolcs-Szatmár- Bereg (HU) and Moravia-Silesia (CZ), both members of cluster 2 can be considered examples of good practice for the management of measles prevention), an important outcome of this regional comparison consists in the fact that most of the participating regions still have serious deficits in providing quantitative health information. To conclude, the “Benchmarking Regional Health Management II” project thus has delivered concrete methods, results and impulses for future benchmarking in this area to improve good health governance in Europe. - 344 -

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