Article at a glance:

A new model for disease management

"Disease management" is the somewhat graceless term the health care industry uses to describe efforts to monitor the medical problems of chronically ill patients while helping them stick to their treatment plans. Effective disease-management programs could save the health insurance industry a great deal of money, but until now they have proved too costly and failed to bring the promised reduction in medical claims.

The take-away

Emerging technologies that support the patient-management process—the trickiest part of disease management—may remedy the problem. Germany is likely to be a test bed for these programs, since its government plans to compensate insurers for some of the cost of running them.