(IBM: Armonk, New York) -- IBM’s vision statement, "Healthcare 2015 and Care Delivery: Delivery models refined, competencies" defined calls for collaboration among providers to achieve new milestones in defining, measuring and delivering value across national and global health care systems.

The study calls on U.S. and international health systems to collaborate in defining, measuring, and delivering health care value, activating citizen-consumers who will become increasingly responsible for their own health care, and promoting improved health promotion and care delivery in the face of growing challenges.

Placing a spotlight directly on the driving forces that are challenging existing health care delivery systems—including globalization, consumerism, changing demographics, and lifestyles, diseases that are more expensive to treat, the proliferation of medical technologies and treatments, financial constraints, resource shortages, increasingly unrealistic societal expectations and norms, and an absence of information systems, among others—IBM stated that the only cure for health systems around the world is a fundamental transformation of health care.

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