2016 The Evolving Health Care Landscape: How Employees, Organizations, and Institutions are Adapting and Innovating

Abstract

This volume introduces the reader to a host of innovations being experi-mented with across the health care industries in the United States and in the United Kingdom. Each of the chapters included in this volume offers an in-depth analysis of the ways in which regulators, organizations,  professions, unions, or employees are confronting the increasing and  multifaceted pressures and challenges bearing down on the health care industry as a whole and on its key stakeholders. These pressures and chal-lenges include growing complexity, optimizing multiple performance  outcomes simultaneously, and (radically) changing regulatory regimes.Addressing these pressures has required innovative responses by each group of stakeholders. Before specifying responses, we provide an over-view of the dominant and often conflicting pressures and challenges that have driven health care industry actors to seek out new practices and  arrangements across a host of clinical, technological, employment, and financial domains.Although these pressures are varied, there are three categories of  challenges that have played an especially central role in affecting health care industry actors as they attempt to change and innovate. Specifically, health care organizations face an industry characterized by (1) increased complexity, (2) the need to satisfy and deliver on multiple performance outcome metrics simultaneously, and (3) changing environmental and regulatory conditions. In what follows, we briefly summarize each of these pressures and the effect that they are likely having on the responses of health care industry stakeholders.