Managing a Health Care Alliance: Improving Community Cancer Care

This powerful book is essential reading for those who want to deliver better care to patients and to understand the pivotal role of health care alliances between public and private participants.

Category: Healthcare

This title is part of the Healthcare Administration list.

Of Interest:

Competitive Strategy for Health Care Organization

Health Care and Insurance: Distortions in the Financing of Medical Expenditures

Health Care Risk Management: Organization and Claims Administration

Hospitals, Health and People

Hospital Turnarounds: Lessons in Leadership

Legal Aspects of Health Care Reimbursement

Long-Term Care in Transition: The Regulation of Nursing Homes

Partners: Forming Strategic Alliances in Health Care

The White Labyrinth: Guide to the Health Care System

Written for health care managers, policy makers, and health service providers, Managing a Health Care Alliance describes the formation of new organizational alliances, working strategic alliances between public and private participants, dedicated to ensuring state-of-the art health care within local communities.

Written for health care managers, policy makers, and health service providers alike, Managing a Health Care Alliance describes the establishment and potential of organizational alliances dedicated to providing state-of-the-art health care for local communities. The book grew out of an evaluation of the Community Clinical Oncology Program (CCOP)-a groundbreaking initiative funded by the National Cancer Institute (NCI)-that linked 52 communities from Massachusetts to California with major research centers. CCOP is directed and monitored by NCI's Division of Cancer Prevention.

The authors' goals in writing the book were to demonstrate the potential impact of public-private alliances on the provision of cancer care in the community; to improve management of these alliances through better decisionmaking by participants; and to advance thinking about the role of alliances in other areas of health care delivery.

First published in 1996, this Beard Books edition includes a new preface written by the current director and associate director of NCI's Division of Cancer Prevention. This preface brings CCOP's activities up to date and discusses the evaluation findings from the perspective of the passing of four years.

CCOP represented a change in attitude from previous NCI efforts to assist cancer-care centers in reaching out beyond the confines of their own institutions. In previous programs, participating physicians could enroll patients in protocols used by sponsoring institutions but were not given membership in the research groups in those institutions. One of the founders of CCOP said, "(w)e created the specialty of medical oncology and it grew like wildfire. You suddenly have out there some 2,800 physicians who are young and well-trained, who are going to, one way or another, treat this population of patients. They might as well be part of the research effort."

From inception in 1983 to 1986, CCOP focused on the development of concepts and the testing of chemical agents in the treatment of acute leukemias and solid tumors. In 1986, NCI expanded CCOP's mission to include trials of cancer prevention and controls. The program's launch was not without its difficulties. As one community oncologist said, "(t)he initial response of community oncologists has generally been positive and enthusiastic but tempered by a sense of caution and even suspicion. Community oncologists…are apprehensive at the complexities of the mechanisms dealing with the federal bureaucracy and potential loss of control of their patients." Managing Health Care Alliances shows how all participants overcame caution, suspicion and other obstacles to create an effective, far-reaching oncology program.

Using CCOP as an example, Drs. Kaluzny and Warnecke demonstrate clearly and cogently how to meet the challenges of providing quality health services by creating new organizational models-working, strategic alliances between public and private participants. They offer compelling evidence of the effectiveness of joining clinical research facilities and community providers. Their work concluded that the research centers indeed benefit from the pool of diverse participants in clinical trials, and the communities have access to state-of-the-art care.

This authoritative book is essential reading for those who want to deliver better care to patients through the mechanism of alliances. It deals with highly technical information, but is highly readable and doesn't "talk down" to the layperson.

Dr. Kaluzny is Professor of Health Policy and Administration in the UNC School of Public Health and a Senior Fellow in the Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research. He has been the recipient of numerous awards including the NCI Year 2000 Award, the Edward G. McGavran Award for Excellence in Teaching and Bernard G. Greenberg Alumni Endowment Award. Dr. Kaluzny is a nationally recognized expert in cancer prevention and control, health services research and evaluation, and organizational theory and behavior. He has served on numerous national committees including Chairman of the Board of Scientific Counselors for the NCI Division of Cancer Prevention and Control, was a member of the NCI Special Review Group on Cancer Control, and presently serves as an Associate Editor of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. He is the author of numerous articles and has co-authored several books, including Managing a Health Care Alliance: Improving Community Cancer Care, with Richard Warnecke, and Partners for the Dance: Forming Strategic Alliances in Health Care, with Howard Zuckerman and Thomas Ricketts.

Dr. Warnecke is a Professor of Sociology and of Epidemiology and Biometry at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Currently, he serves as the Director for both the Health Policy Center and the Center for Health Services Research at the UIC Health Research and Policy Centers. He also served as Director of UIC/SRL from 1981 to 1996. Dr. Warnecke served as: (1) Co-Principal Investigator of the second evaluation of the CCOP evaluation project. He has been actively involved as a cancer control researcher for 25 years and has a long-standing relationship with the National Cancer Institute, both as a principal investigator and a grant reviewer. He received one of the first Cancer Control Science Program Grants ever warded by NCI, and has published more than 40 paper and two books concerned with cancer control topics. Photo from the Health Research and Policy Centers website.