Health care system facing change : Physician networks: Driving force for integrated care?

The German health care system is faced with enormous challenges: population ageing, more chronic diseases and multimorbidity. The fragmentation of medical care into disconnected parts-ambulant and clinical services, pharmaceutical provision, nursing care etc.-is inefficient and inhibits coordinated courses of treatment. Instead of this new types of organizational structures and processes are needed. By means of different health care acts the German government has supported innovative medical care structures for many years. In the meantime, 30,000 doctors have joined 400 physician networks. Their aims are to improve the coordination of services, to facilitate collaboration among providers and to ensure better health care to the population. Furthermore, those interdisciplinary networks are crucial prerequisites for integrated health care. But there is still a lot of work to do. The successful integration of the components of health care into functioning process chains depends on political, economic and sociocultural parameters. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.