Accountable care organizations (ACOs) are forming in communities across the country. In ACOs, health care providers take responsibility for a defined patient popu­lation, coordinate their care across settings, and are held jointly accountable for the quality and cost of care. This issue brief reports on results from a survey that assesses hospitals' readiness to participate in ACOs. Results sho...

The concept of "alignment" between physicians and hospitals is a popular buzzword in the age of health care reform. Despite their often tumultuous histories, physicians and hospitals find themselves under increasing pressures to work together toward common goals. However, effective alignment is more than just simple cooperation between parties. The process of achieving alignment does not have s...

PURPOSE As multi-institutional research networks assume a central role in clinical research, they must address the challenge of sustainability. Despite its importance, the concept of network sustainability has received little attention in the literature, and the sustainability strategies of durable scientific networks have not been described. INNOVATION The Health Maintenance Organization Res...

Health systems across the United States have started their journeys toward population health management and the future of accountable care. Models of population health management include patient-centered medical homes and private sector accountable care organizations (ACOs). Other models include public sector efforts, such as Physician Group Practice Transition Demonstrations, Medicare Health C...

This study provided a national profile of health insurance of certain vulnerable populations including children, racial/ethnic minorities, low-income families, non-metropolitan statistical area (MSA) residents, and those with poor health status. The study shows an increase in the proportion of uninsured nonelderly population. While public insurance helped reduce the employment- and health-relat...

Managed care has grown dramatically over the years, first among private employers, then in Medicaid programs (Medi-Cal in California) and in the Medicare system. Today, two in five older persons in California (40%) are in Medicare HMOs at any one time. Nationwide, one in six (17%) among the elderly population is in a Medicare HMO. This Policy Brief reports new findings on access to care of elde...

Accountable care organizations have received considerable attention as a component of health care reform and have been specifically addressed in recent national legislation and demonstration projects by CMS. The role or roles of radiologists in such organizations are currently unclear, as are changes to the ways in which imaging services will be delivered. The authors review concepts fundamenta...

Physician executives are vying for top positions in health care organizations. With so many qualified candidates in the marketplace, how can you differentiate yourself as a strong contender? Recruiters search through hundreds of résumés, not the ten or 20 that many hospital and HMO CEOs have seen. Recruiters--the people who actually find specific candidates--were interviewed to find out what th...

AIMS: Increased access to health care, including addiction treatment, has long been a goal of health reform in the U.S. An unanswered question is whether reform will change the way people get to addiction treatment; when treatment is easily accessible, do individuals self-refer, or do they still enter treatment via ultimatums, and if so, from which sources? To begin examining this, we used a si...

Illustrative estimates suggest that if all acute health care services were delivered through staff- or group-model health maintenance organizations (HMOs), national health spending might be almost 10 percent lower. If the delivery of all such services (except those now provided by staff- or group-model HMOs) were subject to utilization review arrangements incorporating precertification and conc...