Additional research and experimentation can help us address difficult questions such as how best to measure quality and cost-effectiveness in health-care delivery and how to give doctors and hospitals incentives to adopt best practices and improved information technologies. The solutions we choose for access and quality will interact in important ways with the third critical issue – the issue of cost.
New initiatives in the oversight of payment systems domain have begun and efforts to necessitate standards through a consultative process that is need-based and appropriately calibrated to reflect rational expectations have taken full form.