Cost Containment And Health Planning

Racial and ethnic disparities in health care are known to reflect access to care and other issues that arise from differing socioeconomic conditions. There is, however, increasing evidence that even after such differences are accounted for, race and ethnicity remain significant predictors of the quality of health care received. In Unequal Treatment, a panel of experts documents this evidence and explores how persons of color experience the health care environment. The book examines how disparities in treatment may arise in health care systems and looks at aspects of the clinical encounter that may contribute to such disparities. Patients' and providers' attitudes, expectations, and behavior are analyzed. How to intervene? Unequal Treatment offers recommendations for improvements in medical care financing, allocation of care, availability of language translation, community-based care, and other arenas. The committee highlights the potential of cross-cultural education to improve provider-patient communication and offers a detailed look at how to integrate cross-cultural learning within the health professions. The book concludes with recommendations for data collection and research initiatives. Unequal Treatment will be vitally important to health care policymakers, administrators, providers, educators, and students as well as advocates for people of color.

Emphasizing practical considerations in designing and carrying out primary health care programs, this is a superb introductory text for public health students. It will be of particular interest to those working with rural populations in developing countries with limited resources. Part I covers policy issues and the conceptual framework for planning, management and evaluation. Part II reviews essential methods for effective implementation, considering the economic, political, epidemiologic, demographic and other components that contribute to the assessment of health needs and resource allocation. Part III discusses specific tools and techniques in program management related to decision analysis, network analysis, survey techniques, cost-effectiveness appraisal, and much more. Comprehensive and informative, this highly practical work is the result of many years of experience in teaching and working with health care planners from around the world.

In this book the authors explore the state of the art on efficiency measurement in health systems and international experts offer insights into the pitfalls and potential associated with various measurement techniques. The authors show that: - The core idea of efficiency is easy to understand in principle - maximizing valued outputs relative to inputs, but is often difficult to make operational in real-life situations - There have been numerous advances in data collection and availability, as well as innovative methodological approaches that give valuable insights into how efficiently health care is delivered - Our simple analytical framework can facilitate the development and interpretation of efficiency indicators.