As health care reform inches forward, insurers, doctors and hospitals seek to improve quality and control costs.
Many of these changes revolve around the idea of collaborative care, a prevention-based model that seeks to organize health care businesses around patient outcomes; the goal is to control costs and make people healthier. Free-market competition and a rethinking of the relationship between employers and health insurance are among other changes under way. It’s a battle eld marked by uncertainty and innovation, along with a deep-seated desire to conquer one of the nation’s biggest challenges: our extraordinarily expensive and ine cient health-care delivery system.