similarly korea mexico portugal and the united states underperform in the treatment of infectious diseases in practice however except for the preliminary data on amenable mortality recently developed at the oecd comparable crosscountry data on outcomes by disease are seldom available measuring inputs and costs per disease also faces obstacles heijink and renaud as the lack of information on ambulatory care practices and pharmaceutical consumption makes it difficult to fully document a care episode deriving crosscountry efficiency estimates at the disease level except for a few specific illnesses is thus currently not possible