Public contracting of home respiratory care services through an electronic quasi‐market model

Respiratory diseases are becoming a major challenge in health systems as they cover expanding and diversified pathologies such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, chronic bronchitis, emphysema and other types increasing at a fast rate as it is the case of sleep apnoea. Nowadays, most of these pathologies can be treated by home respiratory care services using advanced medical equipment as well as efficient assistance and monitoring services supported by digital technologies. However, the implementation of home respiratory care services implies flexible public contracting of such services to achieve equity conditions of access and to cope with their technological nature, their continuous processes of innovation and their time dependent demand. Unfortunately, traditional procurement processes are not able to meet these challenges explaining their frequent low rates of success and so an alternative procurement approach is proposed in this paper based on an electronic quasi‐market model. This new model was successfully applied in Portugal and the evaluated results are also discussed herein. Highlights Home health care (HHC) is a key strategy to reinvent public health services. HHC requires innovative and flexible e‐public contracting models. A new model based on the concept of quasi‐market is proposed. This model was successfully applied to home respiratory care services in Portugal.