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...

Interventions to improve health outcomes among patients with diabetes, especially racial or ethnic minorities, must address the multiple factors that make this disease so pernicious. We describe an intervention on the South Side of Chicago-a largely low-income, African American community-that integrates the strengths of health systems, patients, and communities to reduce disparities in diabetes...

This article assesses the participation and the financial performance of licensed health maintenance organization (HMOs) in the Medicaid market. The study found that participation by Medicaid Dominant plans has more than doubled from 11 percent in 1992 to 23 percent in 1998 while Medicaid membership in Commercial Dominant plans declined from 71 percent in 1994 to 51 percent in 1998. Both partic...

The emergence of investor-owned firms as major actors in U.S. health care financing and delivery has led to calls for federal and state intervention to protect nonprofits and to stem the for-profit sector's growth. High-profile scandals involving some of these firms have lent urgency to such proposals. This paper considers the case for government intervention to protect the nonprofit health sec...

In this paper we discuss the potential role capital markets will play in health care restructuring. According to theory, agency costs, asymmetric information and strategic interactions cause the cost of capital for nonprofit entities to slope upward. Freestanding nonprofits are particularly disadvantaged in this regard. We conclude that some organizational forms will be less viable due to probl...

Managed health care, health maintenance organizations, and other cost in different parts of the country (Lancaster and Lancaster, 1993). Several economic realities will influence the future containment measures driven by the private sector in conjunction with scope and type of health care provided in the United States Congressionally funded initiatives are serving as the guiding forces in (U.S....

In the past, design has most often occurred fairly far downstream in the development process and has focused on making new products aesthetically attractive or enhancing brand perception through smart, evocative advertising. Today, as innovation's terrain expands to encompass human-centered processes and services as well as products, companies are asking designers to create ideas rather than to...

strategic planning defines the formal decision of a company for its future. like all organizations, health care sectors need to prepare their strategic planning and act according to it. unesco chair in health edu­cation as a leader health sector, describes the course and steps for preparing its strategic planning based on swot analysis technique.