Selecting Health Care Providers

Abstract

A strategic purchaser seeks to achieve the necessary correspondence between the needed health care services and goods (interventions) and the providers. In order to achieve this matching it is important to define with precision and in great detail what are the interventions needed to achieve in the most efficient way the goals of the purchaser before entering in the contracting process. The greater the complexity of the intervention the greater the need to contract with integrated delivery systems and not with individual providers. In the absence of integrated delivery systems, purchasers can provide the coordination of services and other related managerial activities in order to offer a continuum of care to the target population. However, this hands on approach is a heavy burden for purchasers and ideally this approach should be only transitory in order to focus on monitoring outcomes rather than micro-managing the provision of health care services.