How do you know which hospitals are doing the best job? Patients, insurers and employers all have a stake in the answer to this question, but up until now factual information on hospital and nursing home performance has been scanty, and what is out there is based on differing criteria.

Hurricane Katrina delivered an excruciating lesson on "information integration in action, not theory," according to Steve Cooper, chief information officer at the American Red Cross.

The airline industry provides a gloomy metaphor for health care, according to Brandeis University economist Stuart Altman, who spoke at a W. P. Carey School of Business symposium recently.

The tentative contract agreement that assigned a role to the United Auto Workers in managing the healthcare costs of its General Motors members was a turning point in the relationship between business and labor — and a sign of things to come in a global economy.

Ask U.S. consumers about their satisfaction with the existing health care system, and up to 80 percent say major fixes or even a complete overhaul are overdue.

Supply expense is the second highest operational cost in hospitals, but traditional healthcare benchmarking doesn't pinpoint factors that contribute to supply-expense performance, nor does it enable hospital supply chain professionals to see how they stack up against similar organizations.

A groundbreaking study has finally put a dollar figure on a previously unanswered question: how much do physicians' practices, due to government regulation, pay to ensure their poorest patients get the right prescription drugs?

A controversial regulation creates a "safe harbor" from antitrust laws for certain aspects of the relationship between suppliers and group purchasing organizations (GPOs) in the healthcare industry.

In the third and final presidential debate on October 15, Senators Barack Obama and John McCain spent some time discussing health care — an issue which, in spite of increasingly dominant concerns about the economy — still seems to matter a great deal to American voters.

The future of the pharmaceutical industry lies in its willingness to share scientific information, tailor drugs for individual patient groups and have the courage to walk away from some therapies in order to improve outcomes in other areas, says Eli Lilly and Company chairman of the board Sidney