PubMed Health⌕ Search

Biomedical subjects

S F Wiggins

Publications and source records attributed to S F Wiggins.

6 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2001

Self-directed health plans: Web-enabled alternatives to traditional managed care.

New approaches for organizing, purchasing, and financing health care services are rapidly emerging as viable alternatives to orthodox managed care. One of the more intriguing approaches, Self-Directed Health Plans (SDHPs), empowers consumers as the agents of change and decision making in the continuing quest for health system reform. Combined with a host of newly evolved Internet support utilities, SDHPs represent a highly advanced paradigm for health insurance. Most importantly, SDHPs promise to genuinely harness the power and dynamism of free-market solutions in ways that are financially and socially sustainable, and to pick up the innovation process where health maintenance organizations left off. Thus, with SDHPs surfaces new hope that the problems facing America's health care system are not intractable to private sector creativity.

Cost Control↗
PubMed1996

Commentary on capitation.

Virtually the entire health care system has come to accept capitation as inevitable. Capitation will increase in all markets, because health plan premiums are getting squeezed and the only way to achieve and sustain competitive pricing is to share risk and rewards with providers. Providers getting in the game early and managing information successfully can achieve superior financial outcomes while promoting higher quality health care.

Capitation Fee↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Self-directed health plans: alternatives to managed care enabled by new technologies.

Few people believed the Internet would have much impact on the delivery of health care services. However, combined with technological advances in how computer systems are structured and implemented and knowing what doesn't work in managed care from bitter experience, the Internet is being used to create a new paradigm of alternative health insurance products. These products hold the potential to change for the better the face of health care as we know it. Self-directed health plans will be less expensive than managed care programs and offer greater predictability in health care spending. For health care providers, SDHPs' reliance upon episode allowances will create a new market for packaged or bundled services. Providers will be paid to provide solutions, not just treatment. This could represent a new model in which physicians accept a risk-adjusted payment and provide a warranty that they will do whatever necessary until the patient has reached the reasonably expected health status. This is a radical departure from the fee-for-service or capitation system.

Community Participation↗