As organizational units like hospitals or clinics become more autonomous, the service
delivery system is at risk of becoming fragmented. Fragmentation may occur among similar
provider configurations (hospitals, ambulatory clinics, or public health programmes) or
between different levels of care. Such fragmentation has negative consequences for both
the efficiency and the equity of the referral system unless explicit policies are introduced to
ensure some sort of integration among the resulting semi-autonomous service delivery
units.
When health services become fragmented, allocative efficiency suffers. For example,
nonclinical health facilities designed to provide public health services in Poland and Hungary
often engage in secondary prevention and a wide range of basic care because they are
not adequately linked to ambulatory care networks. The university hospitals that have recently
been made autonomous in Malaysia provide a wide range of inpatient and outpatient
care for conditions that could have been treated effectively at lower levels in a
community setting. The newly autonomous general practitioners in the Czech Republic
have been quick to buy a large quantity of expensive equipment that is rarely used (59).
When organizational changes among providers cause fragmentation, disillusionment
with a market-oriented system can lead to some vertical and horizontal reintegration, with
more hierarchical control. Armenia, Hungary, New Zealand and the United Kingdom have
recently experimented with such steps. Both the market model and the hierarchical model
present problems; it is important not to forget the shortcomings of the centrally planned
models that were apparent in countries as diverse as Costa Rica, Sri Lanka, Sweden, the
United Kingdom and the former Soviet Union (59).
One way to preserve the virtues of autonomy for providers without fragmentation is via
“virtual integration” instead of traditional vertical integration. Under vertical integration, a
clinic takes orders from a hospital or a government department, limiting its responses to
local needs. Virtual integration means using modern communication systems to share information
quickly and without cumbersome controls. This is particularly valuable for referrals,
and can include nongovernmental providers hard to incorporate under hierarchical
schemes. Bangladesh and Ghana are experimenting with this innovation.