Optimizing Health: Improving the Value of Healthcare Delivery
| PUBLISHER | Springer (09/19/2006) |
| PRODUCT TYPE | Hardcover (Hardcover) |
As health care costs soar there is increasing interest in examining what society and, particularly, patients receive in return for these expenditures. This book brings together the best thinking from both sides of the Atlantic to explore these issues. It employs disciplinary perspectives to explore various ways that value for patients have and can be determined. It concludes with a discussion of changes required in practice, research, and health care systems to maximize the outcomes received from the provision of medical care services from the patient's perspective. A major section of the book about clinical practice discusses problems that can reduce the value to patients of medical care. All-in-all, the volume is must read for practitioners, policy makers, and researchers who want to find in one place the state-of-the-art thinking and future directions of valuing medical care from the patient's perspective.
Are our patients getting what they want for their health care money?
Should we change anything to give our patients more of what they want?
Do we even know what they want?
When service delivery, patient expectations, and the bottom line are in conflict, quality generally suffers. But such conflict can be minimized, say the editors of Optimizing Health.
Answering elusive questions on how quality emerges in medical care, Franz Porzsolt and Robert Kaplan synthesize findings from closely interrelated aspects of clinical practice, clinical epidemiology, health economics, psychology, and ethics. The resulting systems perspective of this timely book merges thinking from clinical medicine and economics to form the hybrid term "CLINECS". The book challenges readers to rethink the standard criteria for assessing benefit to patients, and shows how evidence-based medicine can be incorporated into actual public health settings, clarifying key medical goals regarding patient autonomy. An international panel of experts offers practical, workable guidelines for:
-Understanding the value of services from the patient's point of view
-Involving patients in medical decision-making
-Avoiding overdiagnosis and overly aggressive treatment
-Reconciling outcomes research and clinical research
-Measuring patient quality of life--even for those who are cognitively impaired
-Improving efficacy and effectiveness throughout the system
Optimizing Health outlines an agenda of critical importance to health care professionals, researchers, and policymakers. This vision also makes it a bedrock graduate-level text for tomorrow's clinicians andadministrators. This is material that will be studied, discussed, debated, but most of all, benefited from.
As health care costs soar there is increasing interest in examining what society and, particularly, patients receive in return for these expenditures. This book brings together the best thinking from both sides of the Atlantic to explore these issues. It employs disciplinary perspectives to explore various ways that value for patients have and can be determined. It concludes with a discussion of changes required in practice, research, and health care systems to maximize the outcomes received from the provision of medical care services from the patient's perspective. A major section of the book about clinical practice discusses problems that can reduce the value to patients of medical care. All-in-all, the volume is must read for practitioners, policy makers, and researchers who want to find in one place the state-of-the-art thinking and future directions of valuing medical care from the patient's perspective.