Chapter 14: Cooperation Across Hospitals: Enhancing Quality While Reducing Costs¹

The quality of healthcare services is a deep concern everywhere for healthcare professionals (Arndt & Bigelow, 1995). Currently, there is a trend of the development and increasing sophistication of technologies that increase healthcare costs, whereas public budgets are limited or at least have not been increasing in proportion to these rising costs. Furthermore, the aging of the population in developed countries, where healthcare system is top-of-the-range, also entails a growing demand of expensive healthcare. Moreover, standards of quality and security care, especially with accreditation agencies, add many administrative tasks in hospital administration that it now represents 10% of work time. The combination of these different factors leads to a situation where reconciling care quality and cost control objectives is harder and harder (Argyris & Schon, 1996; Dekler, 2007).