Managed Care

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Background
Indicators
Quality of Care
Managed Care
Health Informatics
Health Care Management
Financial Management

Index - Child Subjects

Introduction

As health care costs continue to increase, health care stakeholders have begun to look for ways to manage these escalating costs and at the same time to increase the health services to the consumer.

Although many different methods have been proposed, the most efficient and effective is Managed Care. Manage Care is the controlled care of a client throughout his are her lifetime.

A Managed Care System requires a lot of information and a lot of it....no this is not a mistake. The System requires a lot of different types of information from many different sources and a lot of it.

Many countries today control the health care of their population, especially, the poorer members. This governmental care can be the beginning of a very efficient and effective system. It depends on how it is Managed...Managed Care.

Governments in developing countries may need to look again at their role in health care. In developing countries, health care organizations are doing every thing they can to increase their market share...and in developing countries where the government already controls the market, the government is trying to reduce their interest. In fact, what developing countries are doing is giving away the more "profitable" parts and having to keep the parts that no one else wants...interesting...

Goals

Managed Care's major goal is to provide for care for the population throughout their lifetime. By so doing, the overall expenses of health care is reduced and the population's health and productivity is increased. Clients must be tracked throughout the system and their risk factors must be known. This requires that a client has a centralized data base, is accessible, and projections made as to the services needed by the client...before they happen.

Although not yet an issue in developing countries, though rapidly gaining momentum, consumers will soon start demanding "quality" assurance. This assurance can only be given if there is some way to measure this quality.

"Gathering the data to prepare these reports can be immensely time-consuming and costly when they are manually abstracted from paper records, but with a CPR [Computerized Patient Record] reporting on aggregate data can be a by product of capturing data electronically" (Institute of Health, 1997)

and

As outcomes reporting requirements become more sophisticated and deals with complex, multifaceted diseases, it will be essential to have electronic access to the record and tools to efficiently analyze practice patterns and patients outcomes" (Institute of Health, 1997).

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