Interviews with 32 community behavioral health providers elicited perceived benefits and barriers of using electronic health records. Themes identified were (a) quality of care, (b) privacy and security, and (c) delivery of services. Benefits to quality of care were mentioned by 100% of the providers, and barriers by 59% of providers. Barriers involving privacy and security concerns were mentio...

Background and Objectives: Induced demand in healthcare is referred to as provision of unnecessary services or the patient by health services providers, while the patient is not aware of their unnecessity. Apart from being unethical, this practice can potentially disturb the supply and demand balance in the health market, pose financial load on the patient, thread the patient’s health by imposi...

Social impact bonds (SIBs) have the potential to improve the efficiency of government health-care spending in South-East Asia. In a SIB, governments sign a pay-for-performance contract with one or several providers of health-care services, and the providers borrow up-front capital from investors. Governments outside South-East Asia have started to experiment with SIBs in criminal justice, homel...

We investigate the incentive issues that surround the adoption and sharing of electronic health records (EHR) and the potential role of a personal health record (PHR) platform in facilitating data sharing. Through our analysis, we find evidence that health care providers may not have an incentive to share patients’ records electronically even though EHR systems will increase consumer surplus, e...

A recent legal trend involves the resolution of disputes between health plans and nonparticipating providers. These individuals have not entered into a formal participation or services agreement with the health plan, but they may be eligible for and legally entitled to reimbursement for services rendered to plan participants. Resolution of these disputes can hinge on a number of factors, includ...

This paper introduces a new approach for evaluating the quality of health care providers that provides an integrated solution to a number of problems that limit the usefulness of available methods. Our approach optimally combines information from all the quality indicators available for a provider (e.g. from other years, other patients, or other indicators for the same patients) in order to mor...