Competition and prospective payment systems have been widely used to attempt to control health care costs. Although much of the increase in medical costs over the past half-century has been concentrated among a few high-cost users of health care, prospective payment systems may provide...

Competition and prospective payment systems have been widely used to attempt to control health care costs. Though much of the increase in medical costs over the past half-century has been concentrated among a few high-cost users of health care,prospective payment systems may provide incentives...

Hospitalists--physicians whose practice focuses on the care of hospitalized general medicine patients--are increasingly common in the United States, often displacing primary care physicians from this role. While advocates of hospitalists point to evidence of cost reduction and perhaps improved...

The recent rush of enthusiasm for public investment in comparative effectiveness research (CER) in the US has focussed attention on these public investments. However, little attention has been given to how changing public investment in CER may affect private manufacturers’ incentives for CER,...

A great deal of research has examined the hypothesis that the well-being of individuals is shaped not just by the absolute level of resources available to them but also the level of resources available to them relative to others in their cohort or community. Several causal pathways have been...

Teams are an integral component of quality improvement efforts in healthcare organizations. Quality improvement teams may involve persons either from the same or different disciplines. In either case, the selection of team members may be critical to the team's success. However, there is little...