Stakeholder expectations in practice-based medicine.

Competitive pressures are forcing physicians from solo practice into new organizational structures. These new structures and the technologies supporting them have generated suggestions for improving medical practice. This article examines the unspoken assumption often accompanying these suggestions that practice improvement can come about through a closer alignment of the practice's goals and values with its stakeholders' expectations. Because conflict among competing goals is inevitable in a resource-scarce environment, an important question for each practice, and for each individual physician in a practice, is how to adjudicate conflicts of value when the goals of the practice appear to collide. This essay concludes with a proposal for an adjudicating process to help resolve these conflicts in practice-based medicine.