Incentive payments are a theoretically appealing complement to nursing home quality assurance systems that rely on regulatory enforcement. However, the practical aspects of incentive program design are not yet well understood. After reviewing the rationale for incentive approaches and recent State and Federal initiatives, the article considers a basic program design issue: creating an index of ...

While service design and process management have received research attention in the past, there is limited empirical work examining both factors in the hospital setting. Through operationalizing focus as a service design approach and quality improvement (QI) initiatives as process management efforts, we hypothesize that focus andQI initiatives affect clinical quality both individually and colle...

Over the past decade, there has been a rapid increase in the number of initiatives involving "for-profit" private health care providers in national tuberculosis (TB) control efforts. We reviewed 15 such initiatives with respect to contractual arrangements, quality of care and success achieved in TB control. In seven initiatives, the National TB Programme (NTP) interacted directly with for-profi...

High-quality early child development initiatives are expensive. However, careful analysis of the returns on investment for such initiatives establishes that, from the government's perspective, the initiatives all but pay for themselves. The explanation for this is twofold. First, early childhood interventions enhance adult employability and earnings of program participants. This generates $8.2 ...

Service quality becomes the key bottleneck of the adoption of G2B e-government services. In this context, control is an important tool for e-government service providers to direct and coordinate the service process. Based on the control theory, we develop a conceptual model to understand how different control initiatives influence the service quality of G2B e-government services. A multi-method...

Quality improvement initiatives have become a major force in shaping health care. These initiatives are diverse but share a common goal of generating knowledge that will guide improvements in health care. Although quality improvement occupies an uncertain territory between clinical care and research, this difference is extremely important. If a quality improvement initiative is research, federa...

The implementation of service-oriented architecture (SOA) initiatives can help a business to leverage technology and to make it more agile and flexible to respond to rapidly changing requirements. However, enterprises cannot fully exploit its benefits, if bad information is delivered that is worthless to customers, suppliers and partners. In this context, there is a need for quality information...

It is no secret that the health of most Americans is not as good as it could be. Quality of care is poor, health equity is low, and our health system is in crisis. For health organisations, this myriad of challenges and the massive scope of the problem makes it diYcult to prioritise health improvement initiatives. At HealthPartners, a Minnesota based health care organisation with 800 000 member...

OBJECTIVES The main objective was to investigate the applicability and effectiveness of quality improvement initiatives in decreasing the rate of avoidable 30-day, skilled nursing facility (SNF)-to-hospital readmissions. PROBLEM The rate of rehospitalizations from SNF within 30 days of original discharge has increased within the last decade. SETTING The research team participants conducted ...