The Quality Cure

In the United States, the soaring cost of health care has become an economic drag and a political flashpoint. Moreover, although the country's medical spending is higher than that of any other nation, health outcomes are no better than elsewhere, and in some cases are even worse. In The Quality Cure, renowned health care economist and former Obama advisor David Cutler offers an accessible and incisive account of the issues and their causes, as well as a road map for the future of health care reformÑone that shows how information technology, realigned payment systems, and value-focused organizations together have the power to resolve this seemingly intractable problem and transform the US health care system into one that is affordable, efficient, and effective.

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.

The problems of medical care confront us daily: a bureaucracy that makes a trip to the doctor worse than a trip to the dentist, doctors who can't practice medicine the way they choose, more than 40 million people without health insurance. "Medical care is in crisis," we are repeatedly told, and so it is. Barely one in five Americans thinks the medical system works well. Enter David M. Cutler, a Harvard economist who served on President Clinton's health care task force and later advised presidential candidate Bill Bradley. One of the nation's leading experts on the subject, Cutler argues in Your Money or Your Life that health care has in fact improved exponentially over the last fifty years, and that the successes of our system suggest ways in which we might improve care, make the system easier to deal with, and extend coverage to all Americans. Cutler applies an economic analysis to show that our spending on medicine is well worth it--and that we could do even better by spending more. Further, millions of people with easily manageable diseases, from hypertension to depression to diabetes, receive either too much or too little care because of inefficiencies in the way we reimburse care, resulting in poor health and in some cases premature death. The key to improving the system, Cutler argues, is to change the way we organize health care. Everyone must be insured for the medical system to perform well, and payments should be based on the quality of services provided not just on the amount of cutting and poking performed. Lively and compelling, Your Money or Your Life offers a realistic yet rigorous economic approach to reforming health care--one that promises to break through the stalemate of failed reform.

Right now, a country halfway around the world is using forgotten American ideas to deliver the world’s best healthcare at a quarter of the price of American healthcare. Even more amazing: every resident has access to the same high-quality care. Economics for Dummies author Sean Flynn shows us what we can learn from Singapore's superior, free market-style healthcare system in The Cure That Works.

Potent Medicine could be the most important book on transforming healthcare ever published. Why? Because John Toussaint, MD, has dedicated his career to taking action that will leave our children with a better healthcare system than we inherited. This book is written for patients, insurance companies, policy-makers and those who work in a hospital or health system. Dr Toussaint has identified actions each group needs to take to make improvements to the system. For example true transparency means using words like death and risk and error. A patient evaluating a hospital for heart surgery needs to research a few simple measures of quality. * Number of medical errors committed in a hospital yesterday, shown both as a number and a historical trend * Number of surgical infections last month * Number of people who come in with chest pains and die * Percentage of people requiring this surgery who died in the hospital, and how many died within the last six months * Average number of days to a full recovery Potent Medicine is the compelling follow-up to Dr Toussaints first book, On the Mend. The stories highlight the tragic consequences that occur when medical teams do not follow a patients progress and just pass them through the system. It offers practical advice from Wisconsins collaborative efforts to transform healthcare and deliver better patient value and is focused on these 3 elements: * Delivery of care designed around the patient - using lean principles and methods to deliver care focused on patient needs * Transparency of treatment quality and cost - making healthcare outcomes public for everyone * Payment for outcome - move away from fee-for-service to a system that pays based on quality and efficient care Potent Medicine highlights the steps to achieving a quality healthcare system.

The film adaptation of Dashner's third installment of his #1 "New York Times"-bestselling Maze Runner series hits theaters on January 26. This special tie-in edition features an eight-page full-color insert with photos from the film.

Drawing on the work of the Roundtable on Evidence-Based Medicine, the 2007 IOM Annual Meeting assessed some of the rapidly occurring changes in health care related to new diagnostic and treatment tools, emerging genetic insights, the developments in information technology, and healthcare costs, and discussed the need for a stronger focus on evidence to ensure that the promise of scientific discovery and technological innovation is efficiently captured to provide the right care for the right patient at the right time. As new discoveries continue to expand the universe of medical interventions, treatments, and methods of care, the need for a more systematic approach to evidence development and application becomes increasingly critical. Without better information about the effectiveness of different treatment options, the resulting uncertainty can lead to the delivery of services that may be unnecessary, unproven, or even harmful. Improving the evidence-base for medicine holds great potential to increase the quality and efficiency of medical care. The Annual Meeting, held on October 8, 2007, brought together many of the nation's leading authorities on various aspects of the issues - both challenges and opportunities - to present their perspectives and engage in discussion with the IOM membership.