The Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research proposes to plan and conduct a national conference on strategic alliances in health care with a particular focus on rural alliances. Strategic alliances are new interorganizational arrangements that have recently become very important in the organization of health services but especially to rural institutions as rural hospitals, primary care programs, long-term care facilities, health departments, and other institutional providers of care and support organizations have collaborated and built cooperative approaches to solve the problems of health care delivery in the rural environment. In particular, we propose to: 1. Meet with a staff from AHCPR to identify critical issues to be addressed at the conference with a major emphasis on accepting a research agenda for strategic alliances vis-a-vis rural health services. 2. Identify and recruit health services researchers who are involved with various aspects of strategic alliances to present their on-going research activities. 3. Identify and recruit nationally known administrators of various types of strategic alliances to: (a) comment on on-going research activities and (b) assess the policy implications of on-going work and its implications for subsequent research and policy recommendations. 4. Conduct a conference over two days during which papers are presented and structured dialogue engaging researchers and managers of strategic alliances. 5. Prepare an edited conference report that will include major papers as well as recommendations resulting from the conference. The report will be submitted to AHCPR to be considered for publication.
