Description

Across the globe healthcare systems face the extremely complex and difficult challenge of reducing the cost of care while simultaneously increasing access and improving quality. As a result, healthcare organizations have been experimenting with a variety of different innovations designed to address the multiple and competing challenges and pressures affecting their industry from major health insurance and payment reforms (e.g., the U.S. Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act) to changes in the competitive landscape for those delivering care (e.g., in some areas increasing competition, increasing consolidation in others). This volume provides a comprehensive and in-depth analysis of the widespread innovations and organizational changes taking hold within the healthcare industry in the United States and the United Kingdom, their antecedents, and their consequences for different stakeholders. In an effort to provide a rich and multifaceted portrait of the rapidly evolving healthcare landscape, the volume brings together researchers from a range of scholarly disciplines and documents changes and innovations related to labor and employment relations, technological advances, and new methods of delivering patient care.