Introduction
Welcome to Exploring the U.S. Healthcare System. This open educational resource (OER) introduces students to foundational characteristics of the U.S. healthcare system. The first chapter provides an overview of the healthcare system, including a brief history, its basic structure and regulation, and concepts related to individual and population health. The second chapter describes healthcare delivery settings and services, including inpatient, outpatient, post-acute, long-term, palliative, and hospice care. The third chapter introduces health insurance and healthcare financing, including basic insurance concepts, private and public insurance, managed care, and evolving approaches to healthcare delivery and payment. The fourth chapter examines population health management, access to care, healthcare quality and quality improvement, and factors affecting healthcare costs. The fifth chapter reviews the role of government in healthcare and presents current healthcare policy issues. The final chapter explores technology in healthcare, including digital health and health information technology, interoperability, telehealth, emerging technologies, and health information privacy and security.
Chapter content is supplemented with additional materials such as reports, briefs, figures, infographics, definitions, and key terms. Chapters two through six end with a “Knowledge Check” exercise to actively engage students with the content. While this OER was created for undergraduate students studying healthcare, it is my hope that it can also be adapted for use in other programs and shared with others.
Karen Valaitis, MBA, Ed.D.
kvalaitis@uwf.edu
Book Citation:
Valaitis, K. (2023). Exploring the U.S. healthcare system. University of West Florida Pressbooks. https://pressbooks.uwf.edu/ushealthcaresystem/
***Other formats available upon request
Open Educational Resources (OER)
This book is an adaptation of Introduction to the U.S. Healthcare System by Thomas A. Clobes with revisions and additions in text for clarification and flow. It is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License and in the spirit of OPEN education we have licensed this OER with the same license.
It is also adapted with permission from United States: Health system review 2020 by Thomas Rice, Pauline Rosenau, Lynn Y. Unruh, and Andrew J. Barnes.
Book Citations:
Clobes, T. A. (2022). Introduction to the U.S. healthcare system. https://scholarworks.calstate.edu/downloads/9g54xq32m. is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 
Rice, T., Rosenau, P., Unruh, L. Y., & Barnes, A. J. (2020). United States: Health system review. Health Systems in Transition, 22(4), 1-441.
