Minneapolis/St. Paul, because of its history of health maintenance organization development and active employer participation in the health care arena, is often cited as a community in which managed competition has been tested to some degree. This paper reviews the historical development of the Twin Cities health care market and summarizes findings from past studies of this market. It also desc...

Peter B. Bach, M.D., M.A.P.P. I n showing that regional spending variations do not correlate with differences in disease burden or outcome, the Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care has felled the notion that higher health care spending necessarily leads to improved health outcomes. Policymakers have seized on two possible ways to wring savings out of this information. The health care reform bill pass...

Interprofessional education (IPE) and collaborative practice (CP) have been prolific areas of inquiry exploring research questions mostly concerned with local program and project assessment. The actual sphere of influence of this research has been limited. Often discussed separately, this article places IPE and CP in the same conceptual space. The interface of these form a nexus where new knowl...

Passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 marks an important step toward making health care available to all Americans. However, implementation of the legislation over the next decade faces organizational, political, and economic challenges (1). One of the surest ways to maximize the chances for health care reform to achieve its aims is to reduce the burden of chronic di...

Subsidized health care benefits would be guaranteed for early retirees ages fifty-five to sixty-four under President Bill Clinton's health care reform proposal. This is an important policy issue because persons in this age group are the least likely age cohort of the nonelderly population to be working. They are also the most likely to face high and uncertain health care costs. Previous researc...

OBJECTIVES This article discusses current planning activities in Austria after legislation has been passed to introduce the electronic health record (EHR). METHODS After describing similar activities in several other countries, the authors explore the current situation of healthcare telematics and imminent steps toward the implementation of a lifelong EHR. RESULTS Substantial efforts have b...

The most significant investment a nursing executive can make in an organization and to the delivery of quality patient care is the development of current and future front-line nurse managers. We are on the brink of massive changes in access and the delivery of health care. The front-line manager is in a critical position to make it all work and deliver what the public wants: better access, impr...

Contractualization consists in the development and implementation of a documented agreement whereby one party (payer) provides compensation to the other party (provider) in exchange for a set of health services to a targeted population. We describe, through a case study, the history and the process of implementation of primary health care contractualization (since 1992) in Portugal, emphasizing...