Financing, funding and organisation of health and care in Australia

The SIG will include members interested in the financing and organisation of health care, aged care, and disability care. This includes those undertaking research examining the impact of changes in the supply-side (see below) on provider behaviour, access, costs and health outcomes. Research will typically draw on labour economics, industrial organisation, public economics, and applied micro-econometrics and causal inference, as well as other disciplinary approaches (e.g. implementation science).

Areas of interest include:

Financing and funding: Taxation and insurance (Medicare, NDIS, aged care), public-private finance, out of pockets, provider payment models

Market organisation: competition, integration, public-private provision, regulation

Input markets: health workforce, pharmaceuticals.

Provider decision-making: practice variations, incentives, behavioural economics.

Aim

To build a stronger and high quality evidence base for Australian policy decisions

Objectives

  • To enhance co-operation and collaboration between researchers
  • To build academic capacity in research by supporting PhD students, ECRs and MCRs
  • To promote the importance of this research with non-academics (e.g. public servants, research councils and funders, other stakeholders, then public) and within health services research

Joining the SIG

If you would like to join the SIG, please email the conveners:

  • Anthony Scott at anthony.scott@monash.edu
  • Anam Bilgrami at anam.bilgrami@mq.edu.au
  • Jinhu Li at jinhu.li@anu.edu.au
  • Kees van Gool at kees.vangool@sydney.edu.au
  • Nathan Kettlewell at nathan.kettlewell@uts.edu.au
  • Giovanni van Empel at giovanni.empel@anu.edu.au

Conveners

Anthony Scott
Anthony Scott
Monash University

Professor Anthony Scott’s goal is to influence health policy using high quality research. He is a Professor and Director of the Centre for Health Economics, Monash Business School. He is an elected Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, Past President of the Australian Health Economics Society, and was a Board Director of the International Health Economics Association. Professor Scott has been an ARC Future Fellow and NHMRC Principal Research Fellow. Professor Scott’s research interests are in the health care labour markets, physician behaviour, and healthcare financing and incentives.

Anam Bilgrami
Anam Bilgrami
Macquarie University

Dr Anam Bilgrami is a Senior Research Fellow at the Macquarie University Centre for the Health Economy, who specialises in causal inference and health policy evaluation. Anam Bilgrami has over a decade of experience in economics research applied to health and aged care and is passionate about using economics to improve decision making and policy design in Australia. She has experience in both academia and industry, including previously held positions as a Senior Economist and Manager at Deloitte Access Economics. Anam is a recipient of a prestigious Macquarie University Research Fellowship 2025, through which she is exploring preferences and policy impacts in Australian school mental health initiatives.

Jinhu Li
Jinhu Li
Australian National University

Jinhu is a Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Health Economics Wellbeing and Society at the Australian National University. Previously she worked as a Senior Lecturer at Deakin University, and a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne. From 2017 to 2021 she is an Australian Research Council (ARC) awarded Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) fellow. She obtained her PhD in economics from McMaster University in Canada. Jinhu’s research fields of interest are health economics, economics of education, and development economics. Her research interests include the social economic determinants of health and human capital, health workforce, incentives in the health care markets and physician behaviours, and modelling patient's and physician's preferences using Discrete Choice Experiments.

Kees van Gool
Kees van Gool
University of Sydney

Professor Kees van Gool is a health economist specialising in health care funding, payment models, provider behaviour, pricing, policy evaluation, and health system performance measurement and analysis. His research focuses on how financial incentives and pricing arrangements influence the behaviour of health care providers and organisations, and how funding and payment reforms can be designed to improve efficiency, equity, and quality of care across health systems. A central theme of his work is the use of empirical methods and administrative data to evaluate health policy reforms and assess their impacts on system performance, costs, and patient outcomes. He holds a PhD in Economics and is currently Professor of Health Systems and Policy at the Leeder Centre for Health Policy, Economics and Data at the University of Sydney. In addition to his academic role, he is the Chief Health Economist at the Independent Health and Aged Care Pricing Authority (IHACPA), where his work contributes to national approaches to health and aged care pricing, funding, and pricing frameworks. Professor van Gool has held senior research and policy roles across academia and government. He has previously worked at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS), the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and NSW Health. Through these roles, he has developed extensive experience at the interface of research and policy, with a strong focus on producing evidence that informs practical decision-making in complex health system settings.

Nathan Kettlewell
Nathan Kettlewell
University of Technology Sydney

Dr Nathan Kettlewell is an Associate Professor in the Economics Department at University of Technology Sydney. His research aims to improve people’s economic and social welfare, either by informing better policy decisions, or helping people to make better informed choices. He is an applied microeconomist who has written many papers in the areas of private health insurance, economic preferences, and mental wellbeing. His research on private health insurance explores topics related to consumer wellbeing and public finance, such as the role of government incentives on demand for private insurance, how insurance affects demand for healthcare, and the rationality of consumer behaviour. In 2022, Nathan was awarded the Rising Star Award by the Australian Health Economics Society.

Giovanni van Empel
Giovanni van Empel
Australian National University

Giovanni is currently a Research Fellow at the Department of Health Economics, Wellbeing, and Society at the Australian National University. He is an applied economist and physician by training, with a focus on health and labor economics. He holds a PhD in Economics from Monash Business School, Monash University and an MD from Universitas Gadjah Mada, Indonesia. His research explores the intersection of health, labor, and family economics. One strand examines how organizational features of healthcare systems such as hospital competition and peer influence shape healthcare delivery. A second strand focuses on child and family wellbeing, particularly how parental investments and policy interventions affect human capital formation.