Provides background about market research and a summary of how-to guidance for U.S. Air Force commodity teams tasked with conducting market research in order to improve Air Force procurement by emulating commercial best practices.

Considers potential efforts by the U.S. Department of Defense to assess the performance of military treatment facilities (MTFs) in cost-effectively managing health care. The authors first provide an overview of performance assessment in the nonmilitary health care sector; they then analyze the use of average MTF utilization and costs as performance measures, focusing on how MTF size and catastrophic cases affect these metrics.