A practical, succinct guide to the major health systems around the world and what lessons can be drawn from each about improving health worldwide. The essays are designed to give the reader essential knowledge of the history, strengths, weaknesses and lessons of each health system.
In 2015, building on the advances of the Millennium Development Goals, the United Nations adopted Sustainable Development Goals that include an explicit commitment to achieve universal health coverage by 2030. However, enormous gaps remain between what is achievable in human health and where global health stands today, and progress has been both incomplete and unevenly distributed. In order to meet this goal, a deliberate and comprehensive effort is needed to improve the quality of health care services globally. Crossing the Global Quality Chasm: Improving Health Care Worldwide focuses on one particular shortfall in health care affecting global populations: defects in the quality of care. This study reviews the available evidence on the quality of care worldwide and makes recommendations to improve health care quality globally while expanding access to preventive and therapeutic services, with a focus in low-resource areas. Crossing the Global Quality Chasm emphasizes the organization and delivery of safe and effective care at the patient/provider interface. This study explores issues of access to services and commodities, effectiveness, safety, efficiency, and equity. Focusing on front line service delivery that can directly impact health outcomes for individuals and populations, this book will be an essential guide for key stakeholders, governments, donors, health systems, and others involved in health care.
Healthcare and medical services have seen rapid development in various areas of the world, including Asia and Eastern Europe. These territories are now becoming a medical hub for many surrounding countries. Medical tourism is the practice of traveling to international regions for treatment that isn’t available locally. This subject has gained significant attention throughout the tourism industry, as researchers and professionals are searching for specific advancements of medical care and hospital development in numerous countries. Growth of the Medical Tourism Industry and Its Impact on Society: Emerging Research and Opportunities is a collection of innovative research on the methods and advancement of medical travel for treatment in various global regions and provides insights for the growth prospects of the medical tourism business. While highlighting topics including destination branding, community impact, and hospital management, this book is ideally designed for medical executives, hospital directors, researchers, policymakers, academicians, practitioners, scholars, and students seeking current research on tourism practices within the medical field.
An integrated picture of India's global vision, its foreign policy, and the negotiating practices that link the two. In recent decades, India has grown as a global power, and has been able to pursue its own goals in its own way. Negotiating for India's Global Role gives an insightful and integrated analysis of India’s ability to manage its evolving role. Former ambassadors Teresita and Howard Schaffer shine a light on the country’s strategic vision, foreign policy, and the negotiating behavior that links the two. The four concepts woven throughout the book offer an exploration of India today: its exceptionalism; nonalignment and the drive for “strategic autonomy;” determination to maintain regional primacy; and, more recently, its surging economy. With a specific focus on India’s stellar negotiating practice, Negotiating for India's Global Role is a unique, comprehensive understanding of India as an emerging international power player, and the choices it will face between its classic view of strategic autonomy and the desirability of finding partners in the fast-evolving world.
For every story of optimism about the growth of medical tourism to India, there are multiple others about medical neglect. Scratch the surface and you find a thick layer of corruption in this life-sustaining sector. This hard-hitting volume shows a mirror to society and, more specifically, to those associated with the health sector—on how healers, in many cases, are shifting shape to becoming predators. In the essays by contributors from within and outside the medical fraternity, we see the many faces, the many facets of corruption—from exorbitant billing by corporate hospitals to the non-merit-based selection in medical colleges to questionable motives playing strong in the area of organ transplantation. But Healers or Predators? is not only about the illness affecting the sector. It also offers solutions, and some stories of hope. The Foreword by Amartya Sen is an added bonus. ‘This splendid, if depressing, book will do a lot to remedy [the] momentous neglect [of healthcare]. We have excellent reasons to be grateful to the authors and editors of this important collection of investigative studies.’—Amartya Sen
The theme of this book is health outcomes in India, in particular to outcomes relating to its caste and religious groups and, within these groups, to their women and children. The book’s tenor is analytical and based upon a rigorous examination of recent data from both government and non-government sources. The major areas covered are sanitation, use by mothers of the government’s child development services, child malnutrition, deaths in families, gender discrimination, and the measurement of welfare.
Digital health has faced obstacles from poor IT systems implementation to lack of consumer acceptance. Very little is known about the management, development, and design of digital health projects, the level of IT adoption, and the role of digital leadership that is needed to successfully drive health projects. Digital health, if successfully implemented, offers tremendous opportunities in health data analytics for consumers of health services and service providers that include health information portability, personalization of health information by consumers, easy access and usefulness of health information, and better management of electronic data records by health institutions and the government. Research suggests that despite assurances provided to consumers, digital information security and digital health innovation have been a challenge and are only slowly being accepted. Opportunities and Challenges in Digital Healthcare Innovation is an innovative research publication that identifies digital health innovation opportunities and obstacles and proposes frameworks and conceptual models for digital health innovation that empowers consumers of digital health to use the information to make informed decisions and choices. Highlighting topics such as data analytics, health regulations, and telehealth, this book is ideal for IT consultants, medical software developers, data scientists, hospital administrators, medical practitioners, policymakers, academicians, researchers, and students.
Health-Care Solutions from a Distant Shore Health care in the United States and other nations is on a collision course with patient needs and economic reality. For more than a decade, leading thinkers, including Michael Porter and Clayton Christensen, have argued passionately for value-based health-care reform: replacing delivery based on volume and fee-for-service with competition based on value, as measured by patient outcomes per dollar spent. Though still a pipe dream here in the United States, this kind of value-based competition is already a reality--in India. Facing a giant population of poor, underserved people and a severe shortage of skills and capacity, some resourceful private enterprises have found a way to deliver high-quality health care, at ultra-low prices, to all patients who need it. This book shows how the innovations developed by these Indian exemplars are already being practiced by some far-sighted US providers--reversing the typical flow of innovation in the world. Govindarajan and Ramamurti, experts in the phenomenon of reverse innovation, reveal four pathways being used by health-care organizations in the United States to apply Indian-style principles to attack the exorbitant costs, uneven quality, and incomplete access to health care. With rich stories and detailed accounts of medical professionals who are putting these ideas into practice, this book shows how value-based delivery can be made to work in the United States. This "bottom-up" change doesn't require a grand plan out of Washington, DC, agreement between entrenched political parties, or coordination among all players in the health-care system. It needs entrepreneurs with innovative ideas about delivering value to patients. Reverse innovation has worked in other industries. We need it now in health care.
This curated collection examines Stephen Philip Cohen’s impressive body of work. Stephen Philip Cohen, the Brookings scholar who virtually created the field of South Asian security studies, has curated a unique collection of the most important articles, chapters, and speeches from his fifty-year career. Cohen, often described as the “dean” of U.S. South Asian studies, is a dominant figure in the fields of military history, military sociology, and South Asia’s strategic emergence. Cohen introduces this work with a critical look at his past writing—where he was right, where he was wrong. This exceptional collection includes materials that have never appeared in book form, including Cohen’s original essays on the region’s military history, the transition from British rule to independence, the role of the armed forces in India and Pakistan, the pathologies of India-Pakistan relations, South Asia’s growing nuclear arsenal, and America’s fitful (and forgetful) regional policy.