Redirecting health care spending: consumer-directed health care

In an environment of rising health care costs, defined contribution plans and closely related consumer-directed health plans are emerging as a possible next phase in health plan development and offer new opportunities for the nursing profession.     

Social networking and individual outcomes beyond the mean field case

We study individually optimized continuous outcomes in a dynamic environment in the presence of social interactions, and where the interaction topology may be either exogenous and time varying, or endogenous. The model accommodates more general social effects than those of the mean-field type. We address endogenous networking by assuming that each individual chooses the weights she attaches to the characteristics and the decisions of other agents. This amounts to choosing the elements of a row of a weighted adjacency matrix. Endogenous social networking thus involves simultaneity between decisions and patterns of directed social interactions.     

Prenatal care: Mechanisms and impacts on infant health and health care utilization

We estimate that prenatal care has positive impacts on health measured at birth, shifts the distribution of future health care utilization away from inpatient care, and find that some of these impacts likely come from an informational mechanism. We also find well child visits are used in a complementary fashion with emergency department care in the production of infant health, suggesting that factors beyond barriers to access may drive the demand for emergency care. Finally, we find differential impacts of prenatal care across racial groups with evidence that the information mechanism may be particularly important for black mothers.     

Marketing service guarantees for health care

The author introduces the concept of service guarantees for application in health care and differentiates between explicit, implicit, and conditional vs. unconditional types of guarantees. An example of an unconditional guarantee of satisfaction is provided by the hospitality industry. Firms conveying an implicit guarantee are those with outstanding reputations for products such as luxury automobiles, or ultimate customer service, like Nordstrom. Federal Express and Domino's Pizza offer explicit guarantees of on-time delivery. Taking this concept into efforts to improve health care delivery involves a number of caveats. Customers invited to use exceptional service cards may use these to record either satisfaction or dissatisfaction. The cards need to provide enough specific information about issues so that "immediate action could be taken to improve processes." Front-line employees should be empowered to respond to complaints in a meaningful way to resolve the problem before the client leaves the premises.     

Forecasting requirements for health care personnel

Accurate forecasting of requirements for health care personnel is an important part of avoiding significant imbalances that create costly inefficiencies in health care markets. Manpower shortages threaten access, quality, and costs of health care. This article reviews five general approaches previously used to determine manpower requirements. Suggestions are made for the analytic components of a comprehensive model for identifying significant imbalances in supply or demand for health care workers.     

Cost-effective health care: new data

The key to health care programs that meet their goals is to integrate data, coordinate care and ensure a patient-centered not cost-centered, focus. Then the purchaser can achieve the desired decrease in cost of care, increase in quality of care, improvement in quality of life, improvement in job performance, decrease in disability and decrease in absenteeism.     

Palliative care: a paradigm of care responsive to the demands for health care reform in America

Palliative care is poised to become a universally available approach to health care which addresses both the needs of patients and families experiencing serious, progressive, and life-threatening illness, and also the costs of delivering such needed services. Palliative care and hospice are part of a continuum of care with palliative care provided at any time during the illness trajectory, while hospice care is offered at the end of life. Within the context of health care reform, we believe palliative care addresses critical economic imperatives while enhancing quality of life even as death approaches. As leaders in health care, advance practice nurses, specifically, and the nursing community in general are best positioned with the knowledge, expertise, and commitment to advance the specialty of palliative care and lead the way in the reform of America's health care system.     

Retiree health care benefits: a new standard of care

Solving the problem of continually rising retiree health care costs may ultimately require a new type of health care system. By monitoring individual behavior and intervening when necessary to modify potentially harmful behavior, we can reduce the present system's wasteful emphasis on hospitals and drugs.