The development of a PPO: a comparative case study.

Preferred provider organizations (PPOs) have been under speculation by both the business community and the health care industry in their guests for ways to control health care costs since the first PPO sprang up less than a decade ago. But few of these new health care organizations have been active long enough to establish a reasonable track record. The author has, however, been directly involved with two of them over the past three years and hopes that the following information on their development and the resulting organizational structures will provide others who are interested in PPOs with insight into the complexities of this new concept.