Public health consortia: A literature review

Abstract

Regional Health Planning is a health services’ hierarchization strategy that allows actions and services decentralization. Nonetheless, some challenges to implementing regional health planning are identified, such as difficulties in coordinating actions and services in different geographic locations, with different managements to meet population health needs with adequate scale, quality, and cost. In this context, intercity health consortia emerge as an organizational solution that allows better coordination and integration between federative entities, and their main benefits are scale gain in public services delivery; rationalization of processes and expenses; and realization of joint projects that would be impossible to be implemented if managed and funded in isolation. This paper aims to understand how health consortia reach better performance in the procurement and hiring of services by cooperative action through a narrative literature review. The results are organized into three parts: i) definition and concepts of public consortium; ii) definition and concepts of intercity health consortium (CIS); iii) health consortium case studies in Brazil.