Pink et al. discuss some of the issues related to pay-for-performance for individual and organizational healthcare providers. This commentary addresses key success factors for the implementation of individual pay-for-performance in publicly financed Canadian healthcare organizations. Publicly financed healthcare organizations in Canada have been relatively slow to adopt performance-pay programs...

BACKGROUND Health information exchange (HIE) has the potential to improve the quality of healthcare by enabling providers with better access to patient information from multiple sources at the point of care. However, HIE efforts have historically been difficult to establish in the US and the failure rates of organizations created to foster HIE have been high. OBJECTIVES We sought to better un...

The national health services (NHS) of England, Portugal, Finland and other single-payer universalist systems financed by general taxation, are based on the theoretical principle of an integrated public sector payer-provider. However, in practice one can find different forms of participation of non-public healthcare providers in those NHS, including private for profit providers, but also third s...

Disruptive behaviors continue to play a disturbing role in today's healthcare environment, negatively affecting care relationships that can adversely impact outcomes of patient care. Many organizations have implemented a number of different strategies in an effort to address this important issue with varying degrees of success. New complexities and changing roles, responsibilities and accountab...

THE PURSUIT OF EVIDENCE-BASED MEDICINE IS NOW AT the core of the agenda for improving health care in the United States. All major quality measurement systems use science-based indicators of proper processes of care, such as the ORYX measures of the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations, the Health Employer Data and Information Sets measures of the National Committee on Q...

Several innovative healthcare executives have recently introduced a new business strategy implementation tool: the Balanced Scorecard. The scorecard's measurement and management system provides the following potential benefits to healthcare organizations: It aligns the organization around a more market-oriented, customer-focused strategy It facilitates, monitors, and assesses the implementation...

Background: Shared andintegrated care requires increased cooperation and integrated information exchange among disparate and dispersed healthcare organizations that may span the boundaries of health districts and even the boundaries of countries. Objectives: The objective of our study is to support the integrated information needs of healthcare organizations that are inter-connected in order to...

Healthcare organizations vary in the number of electronic medical record (EMR) systems they use. Some use a single EMR for nearly all care they provide, while others use EMRs from more than one vendor. These strategies create a mixture of advantages, risks and costs. Based on our experience in two organizations over a decade, we analyzed use of more than one EMR within our two health care organ...

Healthcare organizations face continuous and accelerating external change and thus must be prepared to manage their own change initiatives proactively. Given that many believe that the U.S. healthcare system is broken and most healthcare organizations are dealing with pervasive problems, some organizations may choose to seek transformational change to achieve the six aims identified by the Inst...