Managed-care organizations have a unique opportunity, still largely unrealized, to collaborate with health-care providers and epidemiologists to prevent health care-associated infections. Several attributes make these organizations logical collaborators for infection control programs: they have responsibility for defined populations of enrollees and for their overall health, including preventiv...

Shortly before his death in 1995, Kenneth B. Schwartz, a cancer patient at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), founded The Kenneth B. Schwartz Center at MGH. The Schwartz Center is a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting and advancing compassionate health care delivery, which provides hope to the patient, gives support to caregivers, and encourages the healing process. The center sp...

Shortly before his death in 1995, Kenneth B. Schwartz, a cancer patient at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), founded The Kenneth B. Schwartz Center at MGH. The Schwartz Center is a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting and advancing compassionate health care delivery that provides hope to the patient and support to caregivers, and encourages the healing process. The Center sponsors...

This article synthesizes the discussions and conclusions of a 2007 symposium on innovations in health care delivery and economics sponsored by Mayo Clinic’s Department of Internal Medicine, Rochester, Minn. “Transformation: A Symposium on Innovative Health Care Delivery,” communicated what current innovations in health care delivery look like, what the frontiers of innovation seem to be, and wh...

Sixteen years earlier -in 1978 -WFPHA had developed a position paper representing the views of the international nongovernmental community that was presented at the International Conference on Primary Health Care held in Alma-Ata, of the former Kazakh SSR. That paper expressed the enthusiastic support of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) for the goal of ‘Health for All’ by the Year 2000 thro...

Physician leadership is emerging as a vital component in transforming the nation's health care industry. Because few physicians have been introduced to the large body of literature on leadership and organizations, we herein provide a concise review, as this literature relates to competitive health care organizations and the leaders who serve them. Although the US health care industry has transi...

although american health policy debates address similar problems to other developed nations, it has factual and ideological specificities. i agree with chinitz and rodwin on the dominance of micro-economics thinking. however, i am not certain that learning from management theory or modifying medical education will be powerful enough to change the system. the vested interests of the stakeholders...

A THE EDITORS OF THIS journal planned this issue on managed care, I was asked to offer an article from my perspective regarding managed care and its evolution in North Carolina. I begin with my experience with Carolina Physicians Health Plan, later Healthsource North Carolina. One approach to this challenge would have been to describe the roles of an extensive list of physicians who played vita...

CONTEXT OF CASE In Portugal, the integration of care services is still in its infancy. Nevertheless, a home support service called SAD (Serviço de Apoio Domiciliário-Domiciliary Support Service), provided by non-profit institutions to the elderly population is believed to be a first approach to integrated care. PURPOSE The aim of this work is to describe and discuss the services provided by t...