New Rules Regulation, Markets, and the Quality of American Health Care

Health care regulation was designed to help guarantee appropriate standards of quality. Yet today regulation often seems to result in mindless bureaucracy or to actually impede positive change. New Rules tells the story of regulation in the health care industry and outlines how to convert regulation from a meaningless waste of resources into a system that truly can help practitioners provide better care.The authors outline the evolution of health care regulation over the last quarter century and examine the relationship between regulation and quality improvement. They show for instance, that while innovation in health care can achieve great leaps of improvement, regulations whose underlying motive is to preserve professional boundaries will be impediments to innovative new ways to meet the need for primary care and health information. And they offer fourteen of their own "prescriptions'' for changes in specific arenas of regulation, including: linking regulation explicitly to shared aims such as reducing the racial gap in infant mortality or reducing medication errors, establishing safe havens for major innovation, encouraging the progression of managed care, monitoring quaity for the impoverished, maintaining governmental support for community-based health improvement initiatives, and other bold recommAndations for change.New Rules is written for health care regulators, health care executives, scholars of public health, health care administration and public administration, and all those interested in the modern quality movement.Brennan, Troyen A. is the author of 'New Rules Regulation, Markets, and the Quality of American Health Care', published 1996 under ISBN 9780787901493 and ISBN 0787901490.