Managed care, bureaucracy, and quality

Competition on quality in managed care.

There is intense competition between managed care organizations (MCOs) in the USA based on cost and benefit coverage, but scant attention to differences in quality. Consumer preference for 'choice' has stimulated the growth of overlapping networks of providers across competing MCOs. These networks have tended to perform less well on the quality indicators in report cards than staff model MCOs. ...

Quality assurance for Medicaid managed care.

Economic and quality of life outcomes: managed care perspectives.

A variety of economic factors have created a growing demand for health care reform and the rapid expansion of managed care plans. Absence of a clear, commonly accepted definition of managed care constitutes one of the major difficulties in constructing a useful dialogue about managed care and its likely effects. This paper defines basic managed care models and outlines for each the degree of fi...

Quality of Life and Patient Satisfaction: ESRD Managed Care Demonstration

To study the effects of managed care on dialysis patients, we compared the quality of life and patient satisfaction of patients in a managed care demonstration with three comparison samples: fee-for-service (FFS) patients, managed care patients outside the demonstration, and patients in a separate national study. Managed care patients were less satisfied than FFS patients about access to health...

System Change: Quality Assessment and Improvement for Medicaid Managed Care

Rising Medicaid health expenditures have hastened the development of State managed care programs. Methods to monitor and improve health care under Medicaid are changing. Under fee-for-service (FFS), the primary concern was to avoid overutilization. Under managed care, it is to avoid underutilization. Quality enhancement thus moves from addressing inefficiency to addressing insufficiency of care...