This forward-looking volume challenges professionals and interested lay readers to reconsider our ways of looking at health and wellness, illness and disease, and the goals of health/healthcare systems. Reframing health systems as complex adaptive systems, the book identifies health care as a central aspect of social care and security for all people, particularly the most vulnerable. From there, the author outlines necessary organizational, design, medical, and community steps toward building health systems that view and practice health care as a human right and can produce optimum care in the long term. And extensive illustrations display effective collaborative problem solving within these systems, in both intriguing theoretical models and the real world. Highlights of the coverage: · Systems and complexity thinking in health and health care · Redesign based on “first principles” · Redesign from an organizational perspective · Working together effectively and efficiently to achieve a common purpose · Analyzing “the workings” of health systems as complex adaptive systems · Person-centered, equitable, and sustainable health systems: achieving the goal Health System Redesign brings a voice and a vision to the most pressing problems in healthcare service delivery, and offers new goals and purpose to health policymakers, health financiers, organizational leaders, clinicians, and concerned members of the local community

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.

The world of healthcare is constantly evolving, ever increasing in complexity, costs, and stakeholders, and presenting huge challenges to policy making, decision making and system design. In Design for Care, we'll show how service and information designers can work with practice professionals and patients/advocates to make a positive difference in healthcare.

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.

Experts estimate that as many as 98,000 people die in any given year from medical errors that occur in hospitals. That's more than die from motor vehicle accidents, breast cancer, or AIDSâ€"three causes that receive far more public attention. Indeed, more people die annually from medication errors than from workplace injuries. Add the financial cost to the human tragedy, and medical error easily rises to the top ranks of urgent, widespread public problems. To Err Is Human breaks the silence that has surrounded medical errors and their consequenceâ€"but not by pointing fingers at caring health care professionals who make honest mistakes. After all, to err is human. Instead, this book sets forth a national agendaâ€"with state and local implicationsâ€"for reducing medical errors and improving patient safety through the design of a safer health system. This volume reveals the often startling statistics of medical error and the disparity between the incidence of error and public perception of it, given many patients' expectations that the medical profession always performs perfectly. A careful examination is made of how the surrounding forces of legislation, regulation, and market activity influence the quality of care provided by health care organizations and then looks at their handling of medical mistakes. Using a detailed case study, the book reviews the current understanding of why these mistakes happen. A key theme is that legitimate liability concerns discourage reporting of errorsâ€"which begs the question, "How can we learn from our mistakes?" Balancing regulatory versus market-based initiatives and public versus private efforts, the Institute of Medicine presents wide-ranging recommendations for improving patient safety, in the areas of leadership, improved data collection and analysis, and development of effective systems at the level of direct patient care. To Err Is Human asserts that the problem is not bad people in health careâ€"it is that good people are working in bad systems that need to be made safer. Comprehensive and straightforward, this book offers a clear prescription for raising the level of patient safety in American health care. It also explains how patients themselves can influence the quality of care that they receive once they check into the hospital. This book will be vitally important to federal, state, and local health policy makers and regulators, health professional licensing officials, hospital administrators, medical educators and students, health caregivers, health journalists, patient advocatesâ€"as well as patients themselves. First in a series of publications from the Quality of Health Care in America, a project initiated by the Institute of Medicine

One of the most complex global challenges is improving wellbeing and developing strategies for promoting health or preventing ‘illbeing’ of the population. The role of designers in indirectly supporting the promotion of healthy lifestyles or in their contribution to illbeing has emerged. This means designers now need to consider, both morally and ethically, how they can ensure that they ‘do no harm’ and that they might deliberately decide to promote healthy lifestyles and therefore prevent ill health. Design for Health illustrates the history of the development of design for health, the various design disciplines and domains to which design has contributed. Through 26 case studies presented in this book, the authors reveal a plethora of design research methodologies and research methods employed in design for health. The editors also present, following a thematic analysis of the book chapters, seven challenges and seven areas of opportunity that designers are called upon to address within the context of healthcare. Furthermore, five emergent trends in design in healthcare are presented and discussed. This book will be of interest to students of design as well as designers and those working to improve the quality of healthcare.

Improving our nation's healthcare system is a challenge which, because of its scale and complexity, requires a creative approach and input from many different fields of expertise. Lessons from engineering have the potential to improve both the efficiency and quality of healthcare delivery. The fundamental notion of a high-performing healthcare system-one that increasingly is more effective, more efficient, safer, and higher quality-is rooted in continuous improvement principles that medicine shares with engineering. As part of its Learning Health System series of workshops, the Institute of Medicine's Roundtable on Value and Science-Driven Health Care and the National Academy of Engineering, hosted a workshop on lessons from systems and operations engineering that could be applied to health care. Building on previous work done in this area the workshop convened leading engineering practitioners, health professionals, and scholars to explore how the field might learn from and apply systems engineering principles in the design of a learning healthcare system. Engineering a Learning Healthcare System: A Look at the Future: Workshop Summary focuses on current major healthcare system challenges and what the field of engineering has to offer in the redesign of the system toward a learning healthcare system.