The Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations was founded in 1951 as a private, not-for-profit organization that evaluates and accredits hospitals and other healthcare organizations. In 1987, the JCAHO launched its Agenda for Change to create a more modern and sophisticated accreditation process to place primary emphasis on actual performance. Coincident with this new emphas...

The last few years have seen some provincial governments introduce public/private partnerships (P3s) for the development and operation of healthcare facilities. One such case involves the redevelopment of the Royal Ottawa Hospital.

The German hospital market has been subject over the past two decades to a variety of healthcare reforms. Particularly the introduction of diagnosis-related groups (DRGs) in 2004 aimed to increase efficiency of hospitals. The objective of the paper is to review recent studies comparing the efficiency of German public, private non-profit and private for-profit hospitals. The results of the studi...

The structure of the Canadian healthcare system, particularly in Ontario, has remained remarkably stable over the past 25 years. No other private sector industry employing hundreds of thousands of people, spending tens of billions of dollars annually and serving millions of consumers every day has survived for 30 years without the need to reinvent itself in quite fundamental ways. How then has ...

The costs of healthcare are a cause of concern throughout the world. This is the case for Europe, where most of the service is paid for by a state healthcare system, but also in the USA, where private insurance has a more prominent role. Several articles addressing this issue, i.e. the causes of this sharp increase and how to reduce the costs of medicine, have appeared in medical journals in re...

On St. Valentine's Day 2006, the BC provincial government promised public discussions on healthcare. The ensuing Conversation on Health wrapped up last July. Meanwhile, the province has pursued more privately financed health construction projects (P3s) and tolerated expansion of the private healthcare subsector. The author reviews the differences between public consultation processes and the Co...

Currently, there is an effort for empowering patient self-care and improving the traditional healthcare delivery models by expanding the concept of healthcare though the provision of advanced online healthcare services. Those services require increased level of information flow and collaboration among patients and healthcare professionals. This collaboration and patient information sharing can ...

The paper examines the recent reforms of health insurance in Chile and Argentina. These partially replace social health insurance with individual insurance administered through the private sector. In Chile, reforms in the early 1980s allowed private health insurance funds to compete for affiliates with the social health insurance system. In Argentina, reforms in the 1990s aim to open up the uni...

Background Uganda Ministry of Health passed the Public Private Partnership for Health (PPPH) policy to strengthen the health system by leveraging strategic advantages of private healthcare providers [1]. The National Malaria program has gone further to develop a malaria case management strategy through a multi-stakeholder consultative process [2]. Makerere University School of Public Health (Ma...