Australia’s National Health and Hospital Reform Commissions e-health agenda has necessitated an improvement in our understanding of the factors impacting the intention to adopt integrated information systems. This imperative is echoed by OECD health ministers and forms the focus for the ministerial meeting schedule for October 2010, ‘Health Priorities in the Aftermath of the Crisis’. This paper...

The growth in U.S. national health expenditures (NHE) has continuously outpaced its Gross Domestic Products (GDP) growth since 1997 and this trend will continue with a 2.1% annual gap for the next decade (RAND, 2010). This nonstop healthcare cost increase make healthcare one of the most urgent issues in USA. Concurred by this study, the key factor that drives up the healthcare costs is waste. I...

The Healthcare 2010 conference at the Omni New Haven Hotel at Yale in April focused on how different stakeholders in the healthcare industry can excel in light of the recent landmark health-reform bill. A session titled "Maintaining Efficiency and Quality in an Ever Changing System" provided valuable insights into several perceptions of these two tenets, with respect to both the current state o...

Although the Institute of Medicine of the USA has recommended elements for healthcare reform, the optimal means for incorporation of these elements into a healthcare setting remain undefined. A process for the implementation of potentially better practices is described that incorporates a computerized medical record into an evidence-based, multidisciplinary continuous quality improvement effort...

Background Patients’ satisfaction is an indirect indicator of patients acceptance towards health management by healthcare providers. Healthcare reform of any magnitude needs to determine their external clients’ feedbacks measured through healthcare satisfaction. This study aimed to determine the level of patients’ satisfaction and its influencing factors toward the newly reformed national healt...

The healthcare industry is changing, posing challenges to Medicare-certified home healthcare agencies (HHAs). With healthcare reform and the 2011 prospective payment system changes, including reduction in reimbursement to agencies, it is imperative to assess an organization's wound care program. HHAs must provide quality care at lower costs, using evidence-based medicine that may include nontra...

This article reports the survey results from attendees at a large US health-care conference. Conference attendees were polled on a number of healthcare reform issues along with some basic demographic information. Few signifi cant differences were found based on respondents ’ gender, or surprisingly even whether they were employed in the health-care industry. Rather, the most striking difference...

In their 2016 article, Saltman and Duran provide a thoughtful examination of the governance challenges involved in different care delivery models adopted in primary care and hospitals in two European countries. This commentary examines the limited potential of structural changes to achieve real reform and considers that, unless governance arrangements actually succeed in penetrating organizatio...

THE PROSPECT OF HEALTH REFORM HAS UNLEASHED A FRENZY OF activity in healthcare: mergers, consolidations, alliances, physician-hospital organization development, practice acquisition, and the like. These strategies assume managed care-based reform, in which funding for those who are newly enfranchised will flow not to individual providers, but to systems and networks. This assumption is probably...