Beyond Gatekeeping: Enlisting Patients as Agents for Quality and Cost-Containment

Utilization management as a cost-containment strategy

Utilization management (UM) is now an integral part of most public and private health plans. Hospital review, until recently the primary focus of UM, is associated with a reduction in bed days and rate of hospital cost increases. These reductions appear to have had limited impact on aggregate health care costs because of increases in unmanaged services. In the future, with electronic connectivi...

Must we choose between quality and cost containment?

Accepted for publication 10 September 1996 Introduction For the past few years, the United States has been engaged in a public policy debate about how to reform the healthcare system to assure access to care while cost containment. Underlying the deliberations is a concern that quality and cost containment are a trade off that is, that efforts to contain costs inevitably result in lower quality...

Low-Cost Error Containment and Recovery for Onboard Guarded Software Upgrading and Beyond

ÐMessage-driven confidence-driven (MDCD) error containment and recovery, a low-cost approach to mitigating the effect of software design faults in distributed embedded systems, is developed for onboard guarded software upgrading for deep-space missions. In this paper, we first describe and verify the MDCD algorithms in which we introduce the notion of ªconfidence-drivenº to complement the ªcomm...

Cost containment and incentives for technology.

Cost-containment and cost-management strategies.

The leadership and boards of trustees of all healthcare organizations are the ultimate stewards of the limited resources available to best meet community needs. The strategic planning process leads the organization down a clear path of setting priorities, making choices, and taking action. The day a new cancer center opens or the latest technology arrives is an exciting one for the community. A...