Many HMOs offer discounts at health clubs and fitness centers and provide cancer screening and other tests for early detection and treatment of disease. While Ensuring Quality HMOs employ or contract with select networks of doctors, hospitals, and other types of health care providers. HMO members use providers within their plan's network. This system has enabled HMOs to control health care costs as well as monitor providers for quality. Because HMOs direct a high volume of business to providers within a network, providers are able to offer HMOs lower prices for their services.
Networks also enable HMOs to monitor the quality of care their members receive.
HMOs review their providers' credentials before accepting them into the network. Once providers become part of an HMO network, their performance is routinely reviewed. Teams of physicians and other health care professionals regularly look at patient treatment histories in order to evaluate the appropriateness of all health care services. This practice, known as utilization review or utilization management, discourages the use of unnecessary procedures and duplicative tests, ensures that treatment is provided in the most appropriate setting, and establishes high standards of care. Emphasis on a Personal Physician Chosen by the Member Upon joining an HMO, members select a primary care physician who becomes both their personal doctor and their health care manager.