Navigating our complicated health care system is essential for anyone interested in remaining healthy. If you happen to be blind, chances are you are familiar with the misperception by others of what our blindness means.
The Institute of Medicine study Crossing the Quality Chasm (2001) recommended that an interdisciplinary summit be held to further reform of health professions education in order to enhance quality and patient safety. Health Professions Education: A Bridge to Quality is the follow up to that summit, held in June 2002, where 150 participants across disciplines and occupations developed ideas about how to integrate a core set of competencies into health professions education. These core competencies include patient-centered care, interdisciplinary teams, evidence-based practice, quality improvement, and informatics. This book recommends a mix of approaches to health education improvement, including those related to oversight processes, the training environment, research, public reporting, and leadership. Educators, administrators, and health professionals can use this book to help achieve an approach to education that better prepares clinicians to meet both the needs of patients and the requirements of a changing health care system.
The Social Security Administration (SSA) administers two programs that provide benefits based on disability: the Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) program and the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program. This report analyzes health care utilizations as they relate to impairment severity and SSA's definition of disability. Health Care Utilization as a Proxy in Disability Determination identifies types of utilizations that might be good proxies for "listing-level" severity; that is, what represents an impairment, or combination of impairments, that are severe enough to prevent a person from doing any gainful activity, regardless of age, education, or work experience.
Documenting the success and result of patient navigation programs, this book represents the culmination of years of research and practical experience by scientific leaders in the field. A practical guide to creating, implementing, and evaluating successful programs, Patient Naviation - Overcoming Barriers to Care offers a step-by-step guide towards creating and implementing a patient navigation program within a healthcare system. Providing a formal structure for evaluation and quality improvement this book is an essential resource for facilities seeking patient navigation services accreditation.
"Personal Health A Population Perspective engages students in understanding relevant personal health issues, by positioning them within a broader population health framework. Unlike other Personal Health texts, this book combines information about individual health, including topics of great interest and relevance to college-aged students, as well as a discussion of the context of community and global health to which each individual is inextricably linked"--
In 1996, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) released its report Telemedicine: A Guide to Assessing Telecommunications for Health Care. In that report, the IOM Committee on Evaluating Clinical Applications of Telemedicine found telemedicine is similar in most respects to other technologies for which better evidence of effectiveness is also being demanded. Telemedicine, however, has some special characteristics-shared with information technologies generally-that warrant particular notice from evaluators and decision makers. Since that time, attention to telehealth has continued to grow in both the public and private sectors. Peer-reviewed journals and professional societies are devoted to telehealth, the federal government provides grant funding to promote the use of telehealth, and the private technology industry continues to develop new applications for telehealth. However, barriers remain to the use of telehealth modalities, including issues related to reimbursement, licensure, workforce, and costs. Also, some areas of telehealth have developed a stronger evidence base than others. The Health Resources and Service Administration (HRSA) sponsored the IOM in holding a workshop in Washington, DC, on August 8-9 2012, to examine how the use of telehealth technology can fit into the U.S. health care system. HRSA asked the IOM to focus on the potential for telehealth to serve geographically isolated individuals and extend the reach of scarce resources while also emphasizing the quality and value in the delivery of health care services. This workshop summary discusses the evolution of telehealth since 1996, including the increasing role of the private sector, policies that have promoted or delayed the use of telehealth, and consumer acceptance of telehealth. The Role of Telehealth in an Evolving Health Care Environment: Workshop Summary discusses the current evidence base for telehealth, including available data and gaps in data; discuss how technological developments, including mobile telehealth, electronic intensive care units, remote monitoring, social networking, and wearable devices, in conjunction with the push for electronic health records, is changing the delivery of health care in rural and urban environments. This report also summarizes actions that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) can undertake to further the use of telehealth to improve health care outcomes while controlling costs in the current health care environment.
Improving our nation's healthcare system is a challenge which, because of its scale and complexity, requires a creative approach and input from many different fields of expertise. Lessons from engineering have the potential to improve both the efficiency and quality of healthcare delivery. The fundamental notion of a high-performing healthcare system-one that increasingly is more effective, more efficient, safer, and higher quality-is rooted in continuous improvement principles that medicine shares with engineering. As part of its Learning Health System series of workshops, the Institute of Medicine's Roundtable on Value and Science-Driven Health Care and the National Academy of Engineering, hosted a workshop on lessons from systems and operations engineering that could be applied to health care. Building on previous work done in this area the workshop convened leading engineering practitioners, health professionals, and scholars to explore how the field might learn from and apply systems engineering principles in the design of a learning healthcare system. Engineering a Learning Healthcare System: A Look at the Future: Workshop Summary focuses on current major healthcare system challenges and what the field of engineering has to offer in the redesign of the system toward a learning healthcare system.
Legal and Ethical Issues for Health Professionals, 6th Edition, has been designed to assist the reader in a more comfortable transition from the didactics of the classroom to the practical application in the workplace. The 6th Edition provides the reader with a clearer understanding of how the law and ethics are intertwined as they relate to health care dilemmas. The 6th Edition, as with previous editions, has been designed to introduce the reader to various ethical-legal issues and should not be considered an in-depth or comprehensive review of a particular ethical-legal issue. The book is a call to arms to do good things, to stand out from the crowd, because acts of caring, compassion, and kindness often go unnoticed.
An accessible guide to family health care discusses drug interactions, symptoms, first aid, and how to choose a family doctor, including a new research about hormone therapy and heart surgery.
Many Americans believe that people who lack health insurance somehow get the care they really need. Care Without Coverage examines the real consequences for adults who lack health insurance. The study presents findings in the areas of prevention and screening, cancer, chronic illness, hospital-based care, and general health status. The committee looked at the consequences of being uninsured for people suffering from cancer, diabetes, HIV infection and AIDS, heart and kidney disease, mental illness, traumatic injuries, and heart attacks. It focused on the roughly 30 million-one in seven-working-age Americans without health insurance. This group does not include the population over 65 that is covered by Medicare or the nearly 10 million children who are uninsured in this country. The main findings of the report are that working-age Americans without health insurance are more likely to receive too little medical care and receive it too late; be sicker and die sooner; and receive poorer care when they are in the hospital, even for acute situations like a motor vehicle crash.