Paying for Quality: Understanding and Assessing Physician Pay-for-Performance Initiatives

Reviews the structure, prevalence, measurement issues, perception, and impact of current quality incentive programs, and discusses how much and under what circumstances they will improve quality of care. Includes descriptions of select programs

Health and Wellness: The Shift From Managing Illness to Promoting Health

Examines the rise in health plan initiatives to promote wellness as a way for employers to manage costs and to engage employees in their own healthcare decisions through wellness activities, behavior modification programs, and health risk assessments

Employer-Sponsored Health Insurance: Down, But Not Out

Presents findings from twelve metropolitan areas about employers' efforts to control employee healthcare costs in response to the recession and national healthcare reform by firm size. Projects employer trends through 2014, including greater cost sharing

The Challenges of Capacity Building in the Aligning Forces for Quality Alliances

Summarizes the challenges and trade-offs in infrastructure and governance as well as stakeholder relations and participation, such as inclusive versus efficient decision making, in an alliance to coordinate regional healthcare improvement activities

Measurement of the impact of Winona Health Online

The purpose of this article is to present the methodology to study the clinical and financial outcomes associated with the use of Winona Health Online, a novel community-wide interactive healthcare Website in Winona, Minnesota. Outcome methodology was developed by the University of Minnesota School of Public Health and the Carlson School of Management in cooperation with nationally recognized outcomes and disease state management experts, healthcare practitioners in Winona, statisticians, and health economists. The main areas of measurement include health status, satisfaction, cost and utilization of services, and clinical quality

Health care expenditure containment in the United States: Strategies at the state and local level

The current status of state and local strategies to contain health care expenditures in the United States is described. These strategies are classified as predominantly regulatory, competitive or voluntary. The actions of two major groups of purchasers of care--state government programs for the indigent and private employers--in support of expenditure containment strategies are discussed as well. The large number of approaches to expenditure containment currently being attempted, and their diverse character, are hypothesized to be a result not only of increased health care inflation and the concern it causes purchasers of care, but also of fundamental changes in the health care industry in the United States which have realigned traditional provider interest groups.