One of the greatest challenges in health care is reaorganizing its core processes. These reorganization initiatives are most often pursued under pressure from empoyers, consumers, advances in medical technologies, and changes in payer policy. Redesigning Healthcare Delivery teaches practitioners, managers, and executives proven new ways to predict and manage the needs of patient populations, improve customer service, and refocus their organizations on administrative and clinical tasks to ensure future success.
This forward-looking volume challenges professionals and interested lay readers to reconsider our ways of looking at health and wellness, illness and disease, and the goals of health/healthcare systems. Reframing health systems as complex adaptive systems, the book identifies health care as a central aspect of social care and security for all people, particularly the most vulnerable. From there, the author outlines necessary organizational, design, medical, and community steps toward building health systems that view and practice health care as a human right and can produce optimum care in the long term. And extensive illustrations display effective collaborative problem solving within these systems, in both intriguing theoretical models and the real world. Highlights of the coverage: · Systems and complexity thinking in health and health care · Redesign based on “first principles” · Redesign from an organizational perspective · Working together effectively and efficiently to achieve a common purpose · Analyzing “the workings” of health systems as complex adaptive systems · Person-centered, equitable, and sustainable health systems: achieving the goal Health System Redesign brings a voice and a vision to the most pressing problems in healthcare service delivery, and offers new goals and purpose to health policymakers, health financiers, organizational leaders, clinicians, and concerned members of the local community
Second in a series of publications from the Institute of Medicine's Quality of Health Care in America project Today's health care providers have more research findings and more technology available to them than ever before. Yet recent reports have raised serious doubts about the quality of health care in America. Crossing the Quality Chasm makes an urgent call for fundamental change to close the quality gap. This book recommends a sweeping redesign of the American health care system and provides overarching principles for specific direction for policymakers, health care leaders, clinicians, regulators, purchasers, and others. In this comprehensive volume the committee offers: A set of performance expectations for the 21st century health care system. A set of 10 new rules to guide patient-clinician relationships. A suggested organizing framework to better align the incentives inherent in payment and accountability with improvements in quality. Key steps to promote evidence-based practice and strengthen clinical information systems. Analyzing health care organizations as complex systems, Crossing the Quality Chasm also documents the causes of the quality gap, identifies current practices that impede quality care, and explores how systems approaches can be used to implement change.
The Future of Nursing explores how nurses' roles, responsibilities, and education should change significantly to meet the increased demand for care that will be created by health care reform and to advance improvements in America's increasingly complex health system. At more than 3 million in number, nurses make up the single largest segment of the health care work force. They also spend the greatest amount of time in delivering patient care as a profession. Nurses therefore have valuable insights and unique abilities to contribute as partners with other health care professionals in improving the quality and safety of care as envisioned in the Affordable Care Act (ACA) enacted this year. Nurses should be fully engaged with other health professionals and assume leadership roles in redesigning care in the United States. To ensure its members are well-prepared, the profession should institute residency training for nurses, increase the percentage of nurses who attain a bachelor's degree to 80 percent by 2020, and double the number who pursue doctorates. Furthermore, regulatory and institutional obstacles-including limits on nurses' scope of practice-should be removed so that the health system can reap the full benefit of nurses' training, skills, and knowledge in patient care. In this book, the Institute of Medicine makes recommendations for an action-oriented blueprint for the future of nursing.
To many practitioners, managers and patients, US primary care is in crisis. Primary care physicians are often overworked and undervalued, and both patients and care providers can feel locked into structures that lack compassion and are unfit for their intended purposes. Healthcare reforms aim to resolve the situation, but changes may take years to deliver and are contingent on numerous outside factors. What steps are within care providers' power to take now? This book lays out a course to deliver compassionate care, quality, and efficiency that - unlike many current patient-centred medical home initiatives in the US - does not require outside funding. After reflecting on avoidable problems and harms in primary care, the book offers stories of hope from innovative clinicians across the US before presenting ten practical, deliverable steps to lift primary care provision from 'poor' or 'mediocre' to 'great'. This book will be of interest to practicing family physicians and general internists, but will also be useful reading for health system leaders, healthcare insurance purchasers and insurance company executives.
Winner of the 2016 ACHE James A. Hamilton Book of the Year Award Healthcare organizations are facing many challenges in this new era of healthcare reform, one of which is to establish a new operating model for the organized medical staff. Deeply rooted in tradition, the current medical staff model can no longer hold in an environment where quality, safety, service, and cost-effectiveness are required for healthcare organizations to not only survive but truly thrive. In this book, the author, an experienced physician leader and healthcare consultant, describes key changes that must be made to redesign the medical staff model. He provides specific guidance and examples to help healthcare leaders and executives work with their physician leaders to face these changes successfully. Well-regarded contributors and subject matter experts offer additional examples and insights with special content throughout the book. The author provides an in-depth look into: The evolution of the physician culture from autonomy to collaboration and accountability that must take place for US healthcare providers to remain competitive in an increasingly global economy Select strategic medical staff development planning and credentialing/privileging approaches that are needed to ensure physician-organization alignment Components of an effective and rigorous performance management system that enables leaders to help physicians achieve mutually agreed-on goals and metrics and align them with those of the organization Medical staff performance assessment and improvement activities, including peer review best practices, ways to incentivize excellence, and how to address issues in a timely, compassionate way Negotiation of performance expectations with management and the hospital's board that are consistent with the organization's strategic plan Physician engagement and alignment strategies that will enable physicians and management to work together to achieve the goals of population health and reduced operating costs Healthcare executives and administrators, physician executives, and board leaders can use this book as a guide to learn from organizations that have successfully integrated and aligned with their medical staffs into a collaborative environment. Examples of organizations with medical staffs that have made a complete commitment to the success of their enterprises and the health of their communities are incorporated throughout the book.
The United States has the highest per capita spending on health care of any industrialized nation but continually lags behind other nations in health care outcomes including life expectancy and infant mortality. National health expenditures are projected to exceed $2.5 trillion in 2009. Given healthcare's direct impact on the economy, there is a critical need to control health care spending. According to The Health Imperative: Lowering Costs and Improving Outcomes, the costs of health care have strained the federal budget, and negatively affected state governments, the private sector and individuals. Healthcare expenditures have restricted the ability of state and local governments to fund other priorities and have contributed to slowing growth in wages and jobs in the private sector. Moreover, the number of uninsured has risen from 45.7 million in 2007 to 46.3 million in 2008. The Health Imperative: Lowering Costs and Improving Outcomes identifies a number of factors driving expenditure growth including scientific uncertainty, perverse economic and practice incentives, system fragmentation, lack of patient involvement, and under-investment in population health. Experts discussed key levers for catalyzing transformation of the delivery system. A few included streamlined health insurance regulation, administrative simplification and clarification and quality and consistency in treatment. The book is an excellent guide for policymakers at all levels of government, as well as private sector healthcare workers.
Today in the United States, the professional health workforce is not consistently prepared to provide high quality health care and assure patient safety, even as the nation spends more per capita on health care than any other country. The absence of a comprehensive and well-integrated system of continuing education (CE) in the health professions is an important contributing factor to knowledge and performance deficiencies at the individual and system levels. To be most effective, health professionals at every stage of their careers must continue learning about advances in research and treatment in their fields (and related fields) in order to obtain and maintain up-to-date knowledge and skills in caring for their patients. Many health professionals regularly undertake a variety of efforts to stay up to date, but on a larger scale, the nation's approach to CE for health professionals fails to support the professions in their efforts to achieve and maintain proficiency. Redesigning Continuing Education in the Health Professions illustrates a vision for a better system through a comprehensive approach of continuing professional development, and posits a framework upon which to develop a new, more effective system. The book also offers principles to guide the creation of a national continuing education institute.
The anthrax incidents following the 9/11 terrorist attacks put the spotlight on the nation's public health agencies, placing it under an unprecedented scrutiny that added new dimensions to the complex issues considered in this report. The Future of the Public's Health in the 21st Century reaffirms the vision of Healthy People 2010, and outlines a systems approach to assuring the nation's health in practice, research, and policy. This approach focuses on joining the unique resources and perspectives of diverse sectors and entities and challenges these groups to work in a concerted, strategic way to promote and protect the public's health. Focusing on diverse partnerships as the framework for public health, the book discusses: The need for a shift from an individual to a population-based approach in practice, research, policy, and community engagement. The status of the governmental public health infrastructure and what needs to be improved, including its interface with the health care delivery system. The roles nongovernment actors, such as academia, business, local communities and the media can play in creating a healthy nation. Providing an accessible analysis, this book will be important to public health policy-makers and practitioners, business and community leaders, health advocates, educators and journalists.
Integrating Social Care into the Delivery of Health Care: Moving Upstream to Improve the Nation's Health was released in September 2019, before the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic in March 2020. Improving social conditions remains critical to improving health outcomes, and integrating social care into health care delivery is more relevant than ever in the context of the pandemic and increased strains placed on the U.S. health care system. The report and its related products ultimately aim to help improve health and health equity, during COVID-19 and beyond. The consistent and compelling evidence on how social determinants shape health has led to a growing recognition throughout the health care sector that improving health and health equity is likely to depend â€" at least in part â€" on mitigating adverse social determinants. This recognition has been bolstered by a shift in the health care sector towards value-based payment, which incentivizes improved health outcomes for persons and populations rather than service delivery alone. The combined result of these changes has been a growing emphasis on health care systems addressing patients' social risk factors and social needs with the aim of improving health outcomes. This may involve health care systems linking individual patients with government and community social services, but important questions need to be answered about when and how health care systems should integrate social care into their practices and what kinds of infrastructure are required to facilitate such activities. Integrating Social Care into the Delivery of Health Care: Moving Upstream to Improve the Nation's Health examines the potential for integrating services addressing social needs and the social determinants of health into the delivery of health care to achieve better health outcomes. This report assesses approaches to social care integration currently being taken by health care providers and systems, and new or emerging approaches and opportunities; current roles in such integration by different disciplines and organizations, and new or emerging roles and types of providers; and current and emerging efforts to design health care systems to improve the nation's health and reduce health inequities.
