A CONCEPTUAL-MODEL OF THE EFFECTS OF HEALTH-CARE ORGANIZATIONS ON THEQUALITY OF MEDICAL-CARE

There has been a great deal of interest in recent years in developing measures of health care quality that can be used to characterize and s tudy the effects of health plans. However, because of the recent emerg ence of diverse types of health care organizations, it is often diffic ult to know which parts of a plan should be combined for analysis purp oses. Also, simple taxonomies of health maintenance organizations (eg, staff, independent practice associations, group, and network) no long er adequately describe the diverse types of organizations that have be come common. In this article we describe these trends, explain why old er taxonomies of health care plans are not adequate, and present a new framework for characterizing and studying the effects of diverse type s of plans.