title: Care platforms: a basic building block for care delivery.
abstract: 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.
authors.affiliation: Harvard Business School in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. rbohmer@hbs.edu
authors.forename: Richard M J
authors.initials: RM
authors.lastname: Bohmer
authors.forename: David M
authors.initials: DM
authors.lastname: Lawrence
mesh_terms: D003695:Delivery of Health Care / Q000458:organization & administration*; D005377:Financial Management, Hospital; D017146:Models, Organizational; D009936:Organizational Innovation; D011320:Primary Health Care / Q000458:organization & administration*