Clinical integration: one health-care system's experience.

Abstract

Clinical integration is occurring continuously in most health-care environments. Depending on the process and model used, outcomes have varied. Success depends on strong leadership, careful planning, and continuous communication. Within health-care systems, further integration is occurring with service consolidation among hospitals in geographic proximity. Such consolidation is financially driven. These various changes reflect the new "quantum mechanics" of health-care management. In quantum thinking, the management process involves viewing systems as a large set of relationships, interdependent and interrelated. It is a new age of increasing complexity.