New professor aims to enhance understanding of financial incentives and cross-sector collaboration in healthcare

By Marianne Lie Becker, mlbecker@health.sdu.dk, 4/26/2024

Søren Rud Kristensen’s research focuses on the organisation and regulation of the healthcare system. He is particularly interested in the design and effects of economic incentives for quality, integrated care, and the impact of patient choice and competition in healthcare.

In his research, Søren Rud Kristensen has, among other things, studied the effects of quality-based pay for performance in healthcare systems in high, middle, and low-income countries, the effects of clinical guidelines, and integrated care. His research is grounded in economic incentive theory and often uses microeconometric analysis of large administrative datasets.

On the agenda

In the near future, there are two questions particularly high on Søren Rud Kristensen's research agenda: Can financial incentives be used to support integrated care in Denmark and what are the effects of the reforms that have given patients the right to free hospital choice since the early 1990s.

The first topic has been a focus of Søren Rud Kristensen since 2015 through participation in several international research projects. Now, with colleagues at the University of Southern Denmark and Steno Diabetes Center in Aarhus, he is investigating how international experiences in this field can be translated into a Danish context with the aim of improving coherence and quality for patients with chronic illness.

At the same time, he is leading a research project funded by the Independent Research Fund Denmark | Social Sciences, which, among other things, aims to leverage the internationally unique opportunities to link clinical quality registries and administrative data to examine how free hospital choice has influenced treatment quality, equity, and efficiency.

About Søren Rud Kristensen

Søren Rud Kristensen frequently participates in international research projects. He is a member of the editorial board of the journal Health Policy, a member of the steering committee for the European Health Policy Group and chairman of the Danish Society for Health Economics.

Søren Rud Kristensen is a health economist with an international profile. He obtained his MSc in Economics in 2008 and defended his PhD at the University of Southern Denmark in 2012. That same year, he moved to England, where he initially worked as a Research Fellow and later as a Lecturer at the University of Manchester until 2017. Afterwards, he was a Senior Lecturer at Imperial College London where he was employed until 2021 and continues to be associated as a visiting researcher. From 2014 to 2017, he was also a visiting researcher at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. In 2019, Søren Rud Kristensen returned to the University of Southern Denmark as Associate Professor at the Danish Centre for Health Economics (DaCHE).