[Health social organizations as a way of public/private management]

This work has as objective to analyze the implementation process of the Health Social Organizations (OSS), in the State of São Paulo, focusing the role played by factors as administrative and financial autonomy, direction proposed by the Management Contract and the use of instruments and innovative management practices, as factors that give condition to the gain of efficiency of these OSS facing the Direct Administration units (AD). The adopted approach was the Comparative Study, which proposes the establishment of possibilities, from the confrontation between two units (HOSS and HAD), to identify the elements capable of explaining this difference of performance between the two models of management. The research points to the positive influence of the administrative and financial autonomy, to the direction given to the work processes by goals setting in the Management Contract and innovative management technologies with the intensive use of the information as base for taking decisions. This result, far from indicating the complete conversion of AD to the publicizing by the OSS model, points to the possibilities and limits of development of AD, by the incorporation of management technologies in the OSS environment.