Medical Staff Integration: Transactions and Transformation PDF

Introduction

There are a few select authors and futurists who most of us reference when planning and prognosticating about health care and its future forms. If any definitive list existed, it would most certainly contain futurists and academicians like Jeff Goldsmith, Leland Kaiser, Uwe Reinhard, and Edward F.X. Hughes.* Each has addressed the topic of health care transition and the future of health care by focusing on his own special area of study and expertise. However, when one looks over their collected writings, blogs, and presentations, we find that they were among the first to recognize health care as a system of providers and institutions, payers and patients, who are interconnected and interrelated in an economic and functional form. They each have recognized that what we casually refer to as "integration" can be measured and studied, and that it has a unique value. I am not sure who advanced this idea first, but I suspect that these and other great minds always conceived of the health care delivery system differently than the practitioners and providers within it and the markets that have actually shaped it.

* Health care futurist references can be further studied at their individual web source pages: Leland R. Kaiser, PhD, http://www.kaiser.net/lee-kaiser; Jeff Goldsmith, PhD, http://www. healthfutures.net/index.php; Edward F.X. Hughes, MD, MPH, http://www.kellogg.northwestern. edu/Faculty/Directory/Hughes_Edward.aspx#biography; Uwe E. Reinhard, PhD, http://wws.princeton.edu/people/display_person.xml?netid=reinhard&display=C.