The quality of care in a health maintenance organization: a personal view.

A health maintenance organization must compete for clients by promising to provide near-comprehensive care, under congenial circumstances, to a defined population, through organized effort, within a budgetary limit. These properties both require and allow the organization to redefine health and health services to correspond more closely to the needs and values of a population, to place greater emphasis on client satisfaction, to foster clinical efficiency and production efficiency, to allocate resources more wisely, and to assess care in coordinated sequences rather than in scattered fragments.