The Healthcare Imperative
The Healthcare Imperative

Author: Institute of Medicine

Publisher: National Academies Press

Published: 2011-01-17

Total Pages: 852

ISBN-13: 0309144337

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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.

Best Care at Lower Cost
Best Care at Lower Cost

Author: Institute of Medicine

Publisher: National Academies Press

Published: 2013-05-10

Total Pages: 437

ISBN-13: 0309282810

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America's health care system has become too complex and costly to continue business as usual. Best Care at Lower Cost explains that inefficiencies, an overwhelming amount of data, and other economic and quality barriers hinder progress in improving health and threaten the nation's economic stability and global competitiveness. According to this report, the knowledge and tools exist to put the health system on the right course to achieve continuous improvement and better quality care at a lower cost. The costs of the system's current inefficiency underscore the urgent need for a systemwide transformation. About 30 percent of health spending in 2009-roughly $750 billion-was wasted on unnecessary services, excessive administrative costs, fraud, and other problems. Moreover, inefficiencies cause needless suffering. By one estimate, roughly 75,000 deaths might have been averted in 2005 if every state had delivered care at the quality level of the best performing state. This report states that the way health care providers currently train, practice, and learn new information cannot keep pace with the flood of research discoveries and technological advances. About 75 million Americans have more than one chronic condition, requiring coordination among multiple specialists and therapies, which can increase the potential for miscommunication, misdiagnosis, potentially conflicting interventions, and dangerous drug interactions. Best Care at Lower Cost emphasizes that a better use of data is a critical element of a continuously improving health system, such as mobile technologies and electronic health records that offer significant potential to capture and share health data better. In order for this to occur, the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, IT developers, and standard-setting organizations should ensure that these systems are robust and interoperable. Clinicians and care organizations should fully adopt these technologies, and patients should be encouraged to use tools, such as personal health information portals, to actively engage in their care. This book is a call to action that will guide health care providers; administrators; caregivers; policy makers; health professionals; federal, state, and local government agencies; private and public health organizations; and educational institutions.

Improving Diagnosis in Health Care
Improving Diagnosis in Health Care

Author: National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine

Publisher: National Academies Press

Published: 2015-12-29

Total Pages: 473

ISBN-13: 0309377722

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Getting the right diagnosis is a key aspect of health care - it provides an explanation of a patient's health problem and informs subsequent health care decisions. The diagnostic process is a complex, collaborative activity that involves clinical reasoning and information gathering to determine a patient's health problem. According to Improving Diagnosis in Health Care, diagnostic errors-inaccurate or delayed diagnoses-persist throughout all settings of care and continue to harm an unacceptable number of patients. It is likely that most people will experience at least one diagnostic error in their lifetime, sometimes with devastating consequences. Diagnostic errors may cause harm to patients by preventing or delaying appropriate treatment, providing unnecessary or harmful treatment, or resulting in psychological or financial repercussions. The committee concluded that improving the diagnostic process is not only possible, but also represents a moral, professional, and public health imperative. Improving Diagnosis in Health Care, a continuation of the landmark Institute of Medicine reports To Err Is Human (2000) and Crossing the Quality Chasm (2001), finds that diagnosis-and, in particular, the occurrence of diagnostic errorsâ€"has been largely unappreciated in efforts to improve the quality and safety of health care. Without a dedicated focus on improving diagnosis, diagnostic errors will likely worsen as the delivery of health care and the diagnostic process continue to increase in complexity. Just as the diagnostic process is a collaborative activity, improving diagnosis will require collaboration and a widespread commitment to change among health care professionals, health care organizations, patients and their families, researchers, and policy makers. The recommendations of Improving Diagnosis in Health Care contribute to the growing momentum for change in this crucial area of health care quality and safety.

Sustainability for Healthcare Management
Sustainability for Healthcare Management

Author: Carrie R. Rich

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 0415530350

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"Sustainability is not unique to health, but is a unique vehicle for promoting healthy values. This book focuses readers on upstream decision-making in the healthcare delivery setting to think through the implications of our decisions from fiscal, societal and environmental perspectives. It aims to link health values with sustainability drivers in order to enlighten leadership about the value of sustainability as we move toward a new paradigm of health. Carrie R. Rich, J. Knox Singleton, and Seema Wadhwa explore leadership priorities, linking them to sustainability, through an imaginary health leader, Fred, the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Memorial Hospital, a community hospital based in the United States. Each chapter frames a leadership priority through a storyline that involves the main character. Practical applications featuring evidence-based sustainability accomplishments and the coordinating reflections of renowned healthcare leaders are woven throughout the book. Every chapter includes leadership tools, illustrations and tables with tips and data to make an evidence-based case in support of health sustainability. The book includes a healthcare sustainability syllabus as well as suggested reading and teaching resources. Bringing together the key components and concepts of environmentally sustainable healthcare operations, this book will be of great importance to researchers, students and professionals working in health and healthcare management."--Provided by publisher.

Making Medicines Affordable
Making Medicines Affordable

Author: National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine

Publisher: National Academies Press

Published: 2018-03-01

Total Pages: 235

ISBN-13: 0309468086

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Thanks to remarkable advances in modern health care attributable to science, engineering, and medicine, it is now possible to cure or manage illnesses that were long deemed untreatable. At the same time, however, the United States is facing the vexing challenge of a seemingly uncontrolled rise in the cost of health care. Total medical expenditures are rapidly approaching 20 percent of the gross domestic product and are crowding out other priorities of national importance. The use of increasingly expensive prescription drugs is a significant part of this problem, making the cost of biopharmaceuticals a serious national concern with broad political implications. Especially with the highly visible and very large price increases for prescription drugs that have occurred in recent years, finding a way to make prescription medicinesâ€"and health care at largeâ€"more affordable for everyone has become a socioeconomic imperative. Affordability is a complex function of factors, including not just the prices of the drugs themselves, but also the details of an individual's insurance coverage and the number of medical conditions that an individual or family confronts. Therefore, any solution to the affordability issue will require considering all of these factors together. The current high and increasing costs of prescription drugsâ€"coupled with the broader trends in overall health care costsâ€"is unsustainable to society as a whole. Making Medicines Affordable examines patient access to affordable and effective therapies, with emphasis on drug pricing, inflation in the cost of drugs, and insurance design. This report explores structural and policy factors influencing drug pricing, drug access programs, the emerging role of comparative effectiveness assessments in payment policies, changing finances of medical practice with regard to drug costs and reimbursement, and measures to prevent drug shortages and foster continued innovation in drug development. It makes recommendations for policy actions that could address drug price trends, improve patient access to affordable and effective treatments, and encourage innovations that address significant needs in health care.

Crossing the Global Quality Chasm
Crossing the Global Quality Chasm

Author: National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine

Publisher: National Academies Press

Published: 2019-01-27

Total Pages: 399

ISBN-13: 0309477891

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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.

The Learning Healthcare System
The Learning Healthcare System

Author: Institute of Medicine

Publisher: National Academies Press

Published: 2007-06-01

Total Pages: 374

ISBN-13: 0309133939

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As our nation enters a new era of medical science that offers the real prospect of personalized health care, we will be confronted by an increasingly complex array of health care options and decisions. The Learning Healthcare System considers how health care is structured to develop and to apply evidence-from health profession training and infrastructure development to advances in research methodology, patient engagement, payment schemes, and measurement-and highlights opportunities for the creation of a sustainable learning health care system that gets the right care to people when they need it and then captures the results for improvement. This book will be of primary interest to hospital and insurance industry administrators, health care providers, those who train and educate health workers, researchers, and policymakers. The Learning Healthcare System is the first in a series that will focus on issues important to improving the development and application of evidence in health care decision making. The Roundtable on Evidence-Based Medicine serves as a neutral venue for cooperative work among key stakeholders on several dimensions: to help transform the availability and use of the best evidence for the collaborative health care choices of each patient and provider; to drive the process of discovery as a natural outgrowth of patient care; and, ultimately, to ensure innovation, quality, safety, and value in health care.

Delivering Quality Health Services: A Global Imperative
Delivering Quality Health Services: A Global Imperative

Author: OECD

Publisher: OECD Publishing

Published: 2018-07-05

Total Pages: 100

ISBN-13: 9264300309

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This report describes the current situation with regard to universal health coverage and global quality of care, and outlines the steps governments, health services and their workers, together with citizens and patients need to urgently take.

Rewarding Provider Performance
Rewarding Provider Performance

Author: Institute of Medicine

Publisher: National Academies Press

Published: 2007-02-17

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 0309102162

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The third installment in the Pathways to Quality Health Care series, Rewarding Provider Performance: Aligning Incentives in Medicare, continues to address the timely topic of the quality of health care in America. Each volume in the series effectively evaluates specific policy approaches within the context of improving the current operational framework of the health care system. The theme of this particular book is the staged introduction of pay for performance into Medicare. Pay for performance is a strategy that financially rewards health care providers for delivering high-quality care. Building on the findings and recommendations described in the two companion editions, Performance Measurement and Medicare's Quality Improvement Organization Program, this book offers options for implementing payment incentives to provide better value for America's health care investments. This book features conclusions and recommendations that will be useful to all stakeholders concerned with improving the quality and performance of the nation's health care system in both the public and private sectors.

Making Eye Health a Population Health Imperative
Making Eye Health a Population Health Imperative

Author: National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine

Publisher: National Academies Press

Published: 2017-01-15

Total Pages: 587

ISBN-13: 0309439981

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The ability to see deeply affects how human beings perceive and interpret the world around them. For most people, eyesight is part of everyday communication, social activities, educational and professional pursuits, the care of others, and the maintenance of personal health, independence, and mobility. Functioning eyes and vision system can reduce an adult's risk of chronic health conditions, death, falls and injuries, social isolation, depression, and other psychological problems. In children, properly maintained eye and vision health contributes to a child's social development, academic achievement, and better health across the lifespan. The public generally recognizes its reliance on sight and fears its loss, but emphasis on eye and vision health, in general, has not been integrated into daily life to the same extent as other health promotion activities, such as teeth brushing; hand washing; physical and mental exercise; and various injury prevention behaviors. A larger population health approach is needed to engage a wide range of stakeholders in coordinated efforts that can sustain the scope of behavior change. The shaping of socioeconomic environments can eventually lead to new social norms that promote eye and vision health. Making Eye Health a Population Health Imperative: Vision for Tomorrow proposes a new population-centered framework to guide action and coordination among various, and sometimes competing, stakeholders in pursuit of improved eye and vision health and health equity in the United States. Building on the momentum of previous public health efforts, this report also introduces a model for action that highlights different levels of prevention activities across a range of stakeholders and provides specific examples of how population health strategies can be translated into cohesive areas for action at federal, state, and local levels.