Adapting to Managed Care by Becoming a Learning Organization

In the tumultuous and chaotic environment of managed health care, hospital-based mental health providers need to change in fundamental ways. The traditional view of mental health organizations is a professional-bureaucratic one where actions and outcomes of planning are thought to be highly predictable. The author proposes an alternative paradigm for viewing mental health provider organizations, one based on learning theory, which accepts that the future is unknowable because of its complexity and the probabilistic nature of the world. Within this perspective, mental health care providers need to become “learning organizations” to successfully adapt to the new and evolving conditions.