Quality improvement--emerging issues to controlling medical costs

While quality evaluation issues are very important to providers and managed care organizations in marketing their service and managing the care provided, they should also be a focus of any employer or other plan sponsor that is financially responsible for providing managed care benefits. Certainly employers can begin to use information regarding the quality of managed care networks to help determine the better networks to offer participants. In addition, managed care networks are employing a variety of techniques to improve the quality of service that employers can and should try to emulate--and that are explored in this article.