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.