The women-centered health care team: integrating perspectives from managed care, women's health, and the health professional workforce

Abstract

T he evolving field of women’s health is transforming genderneutral medical knowledge and making it gender specific. Simultaneously, market-driven health reform is forcing managed care organizations (MCOs) to become customer sensitive, thereby bringing “women” (that is, a sex and gender lens) into focus. Managed care organizations can ask, as a part of their business strategy, rather than as an academic exercise, “How is primary care best delivered to women, and by n, horn, in prospectively paid organized delivery systems?” Most important, MCQs have the power to implement these strategies and can, therefore, redress deficiencies in women’s health care while meeting their own economic objectives. The sexand gender-specific aspects of primary care have only recently become a focus of academic medicine. ‘The Institute of Medicine (IOM), however, still defines primary care in a gender-neutral way as “integrated, accessible health care services by clinicians who are accountable for addressing 0 lyY7 by The lambs Institute