"In Hospital Operations, two leading Operations Management experts and five practicing clinicians demonstrate how to apply new OM advances and metrics to substantially improve any hospital's performance. Replete with examples, Hospital Operations shows how to generate principles-driven breakthrough ideas to systematically improve emergency departments, operating rooms, nursing unites, and diagnostic units." -- Back cover
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.
Despite a strong commitment to delivering quality health care, persistent problems involving medical errors and ineffective treatment continue to plague the industry. Many of these problems are the consequence of poor information and technology (IT) capabilities, and most importantly, the lack cognitive IT support. Clinicians spend a great deal of time sifting through large amounts of raw data, when, ideally, IT systems would place raw data into context with current medical knowledge to provide clinicians with computer models that depict the health status of the patient. Computational Technology for Effective Health Care advocates re-balancing the portfolio of investments in health care IT to place a greater emphasis on providing cognitive support for health care providers, patients, and family caregivers; observing proven principles for success in designing and implementing IT; and accelerating research related to health care in the computer and social sciences and in health/biomedical informatics. Health care professionals, patient safety advocates, as well as IT specialists and engineers, will find this book a useful tool in preparation for crossing the health care IT chasm.
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.
In a joint effort between the National Academy of Engineering and the Institute of Medicine, this books attempts to bridge the knowledge/awareness divide separating health care professionals from their potential partners in systems engineering and related disciplines. The goal of this partnership is to transform the U.S. health care sector from an underperforming conglomerate of independent entities (individual practitioners, small group practices, clinics, hospitals, pharmacies, community health centers et. al.) into a high performance "system" in which every participating unit recognizes its dependence and influence on every other unit. By providing both a framework and action plan for a systems approach to health care delivery based on a partnership between engineers and health care professionals, Building a Better Delivery System describes opportunities and challenges to harness the power of systems-engineering tools, information technologies and complementary knowledge in social sciences, cognitive sciences and business/management to advance the U.S. health care system.
MGH Cardiology Board Review is intended for physicians studying for the Cardiology Board Examination (Initial Certification or Re-certification) and for any busy practitioners who would like to review high-yield cardiology such as those in cardiology, emergency medicine, internal medicine, family practice, or even surgery. Designed for those on the go, each section is meant to be completed in 30 minutes; and at 30 minutes a day, the reader will have a complete overview of up-to-date information in 30 days. Each section has a concise didactic followed by a questions section with an identical format to the Cardiovascular Board Examination of the American Board of Internal Medicine.This book is from the Massachusetts General Hospital’s Cardiology Division, one of the most respected cardiology programs in the world and is its first Cardiology review book.
This book is an unparalleled resource on neurologic emergencies. Most books on neurologic emergencies focus on treatment of a disease after it is diagnosed (such as stroke, subarachnoid hemorrhage, or meningitis). There are but a few books that focus on how to evaluate the patient with a neurologic symptom, before the diagnosis is made. This is the area that frontline providers, including emergency physicians, family physicians, primary care physicians, hospitalists, urgent care physicians, and midlevel providers struggle with. This book is written by clinicians with a clear understanding of the needs of non-neurologists in the front lines of medicine. The editors are board-certified emergency physicians with fellowship training and expertise in neurologic emergencies. Neurologic Emergencies includes these point-of-care-friendly features: Extensive number of algorithms for distinct presenting symptoms Classic neuroimaging findings A concise bullet on what information needs to be conveyed to consultants Reference to relevant national guidelines where applicable Common chapter format to facilitate quick look-up
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.
Intro -- FrontMatter -- Reviewers -- Foreword -- Acknowledgments -- Contents -- Boxes, Figures, and Tables -- Summary -- 1 Introduction -- 2 Background on the Pipeline to the Physician Workforce -- 3 GME Financing -- 4 Governance -- 5 Recommendations for the Reform of GME Financing and Governance -- Appendix A: Abbreviations and Acronyms -- Appendix B: U.S. Senate Letters -- Appendix C: Public Workshop Agendas -- Appendix D: Committee Member Biographies -- Appendix E: Data and Methods to Analyze Medicare GME Payments -- Appendix F: Illustrations of the Phase-In of the Committee's Recommendations.
The Bealaí Ealaíonta series showcases the work of artists based at Gairdín Mhuire Day Centre in Corca Dhuibhne, Ireland. In four separate volumes it explores the creative practice of the artists in their own words, providing insight into the cultural influences and life experiences they have drawn upon in the creation of their work. Volume Three highlights the work of artist Anna O'Kelly.
