Care platforms: a basic building block for care delivery

Without significant operational reform within the nation's health care delivery organizations, new financing models, payment systems, or structures are unlikely to realize their promise. Adapting insights from high-performing companies in other high-risk, high-cost, science- and technology-based industries, we propose the "care platform" as an organizing framework for internal operations in diversified provider organizations to increase the quality, reliability, and efficiency of care delivery. A care platform organizes "care production" around similar work, rather than organs or specialties; integrates standard and custom care processes; and surrounds them with specifically configured information and business systems. Such organizational designs imply new roles for physicians.