SOLVING THE US HEALTHCARE PROBLEMS: THE ACTION STRATEGY

The US healthcare system costs more and delivers less service quality, in comparison with several industrialized nations. This paper describes the critical problems facing the US healthcare system, offers a comprehensive review of various best practices and emerging solutions to address the cost and quality issues, identifies a set of empirical observations from this review, and outlines a rational strategy, the ACTION strategy, to solve some of the noted US healthcare problems.The ACTION strategy, as proposed, takes into account the decision factors, which are important to any healthcare organizations, such as economic viability, technological feasibility, ease of implementation, operational efficiency, as well as being patient-focused, regulatory compliant and risk optimized. When adopted, this strategy should allow a majority of healthcare organizations to achieve steady progress toward cost reduction, quality enhancement, cycle time shortening and patient satisfaction. Practitioners in technology management are well prepared to assist healthcare organizations in implementing the elements of this strategy.