OBJECTIVE Interprofessionalism (IP) has emerged as a new movement in healthcare in response to workforce shortages, quality and safety issues and professional power dynamics. Stakeholders can push for IP (e.g. education providers to the health system) or pull (e.g. the health system to the education provider). Based on innovation theory, we hypothesized that there would be unequal forces within...

It is an exciting, and potentially turbulent time in the evolution of health care delivery in the United States. Despite decades of debate and piecemeal political reforms, the health care system remains inefficient in many ways and is becoming increasingly expensive. Increases in national health care expenditure continue to outpace inflation, exceeding 17% of the gross domestic product. Rising ...

Preface The Payment Reform: Current and Emerging Reimbursement Models white paper is an American College of Cardiology (ACC) member content-driven educational resource meant to provide baseline knowledge of the payment models proposed in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) and the innovative payment pilots already being implemented in the private sector. Recognizing that chal...

In 2001 the World Health Organization ranked the small Central American nation of Costa Rica 36th out of 191 countries for health system performance. Experts hail this as the result of health care reforms which changed the structure of the Costa Rican system and dramatically improved primary health care (PHC). Costa Rica, which has a population of 3.8 million, famously abolished its army in 194...

Teams of collaborators from Colombia, Mexico, Pakistan, and Thailand have adapted a policy tool originally developed for evaluating health insurance reforms in the United States into "benchmarks of fairness" for assessing health system reform in developing countries. We describe briefly the history of the benchmark approach, the tool itself, and the uses to which it may be put. Fairness is a wi...

Last year marks the first year of implementation for both the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act in the United States. As a result, healthcare reform is moving in the direction of integrating care for physical and mental illness, nudging clinicians to consider medical and psychiatric comorbidity as the expectation rather than the exc...

No tort reform has more potential to improve the quality of medical care and to reduce the frequency of patient injuries than exclusive hospital enterprise liability. Hospital enterprise liability would make hospitals liable for all patient injuries occurring in the hospital that are the product of provider negligence, regardless of the independent contractor status of the providers. In its “ex...

background in early 2012, national health insurance scheme (nhis) members in ashanti region were allowed to choose their own primary healthcare providers. this paper investigates the factors that enrolees in the ashanti region considered in choosing preferred primary healthcare providers (ppps) and direction of association of such factors with the choice of ppp.   methods using a cross-sectiona...

BACKGROUND The organisation of Swedish primary health care has changed following introduction of free choice of provider for the population in combination with freedom of establishment for private primary care providers. Our aim was to investigate changes in individual health care utilisation following choice and privatisation in Swedish primary care from an equity perspective, in subgroups def...

Non-communicable diseases (NCDs) are a leading cause of deaths and of disease burden in China. This paper analyzes the rationale and implications of a community-based approach to a better coordinated NCDs care and management system in China. As argued by the author, the buildup of an integrated NCDs care delivery system is feasible now and large health expenditures will be saved if more stable ...