Management

Caring by dataAntoinette de Bont as a Harkness Fellow bij Kaiser PermanenteIn 2010, Antoinette de Bont was awarded a Harkness Fellowship forHealth Care Policy and Practice by the Commonwealth Foundation.Harkness fellows are appointed on the basis of achievement andpromise in health policy research. De Bont received this prestigiousfellowship to study the organisation of primary care.Antoinette de Bont is an associate professor in Health CareGovernance at the Institute of Health Policy & Management.Her primary focus in research has been on the changing roles ofprofessionals in health care organisations. De Bont studied howinformation technology shapes new possibilities for task delegationand how the use of administrative data for clinical governancereshapes the relation between professionals and insurers. Additionally,she studied how the introduction of an outcome-based curriculum formedical specialists affects the relationship between specialists athospitals on the one hand and their management on the other.Over the last two years, Antoinette de Bont focused her researchmainly on patient safety, as the shift from quality management tosafety management was hoped to be a new step towards clinicalgovernance. De Bont’s extensive research background at iBMG hascertainly proven its value during her period as a Harkness Fellow.The Harkness Fellowship offers mid-career health services researchersa unique opportunity to work with leading U.S. health policy experts.De Bont conducted her studies at Kaiser Permanente, an integrated“Both patients and physicians struggle with the shiftingboundaries between normal and abnormal”health care organisation in Oakland, California. In the summer of2009, just before the U.S. health insurance reform became into law,president Obama complimented Kaiser Permanente for its exemplaryrole on how health care can become affordable: “If we could actuallyget our health care system across the board to hit the efficiency levelsof a Kaiser Permanente (...), we actually would have solved ourproblems.” (Friedman, 2009, Times, July 30th). Dutch policy experts28