The anthrax incidents following the 9/11 terrorist attacks put the spotlight on the nation's public health agencies, placing it under an unprecedented scrutiny that added new dimensions to the complex issues considered in this report. The Future of the Public's Health in the 21st Century reaffirms the vision of Healthy People 2010, and outlines a systems approach to assuring the nation's health in practice, research, and policy. This approach focuses on joining the unique resources and perspectives of diverse sectors and entities and challenges these groups to work in a concerted, strategic way to promote and protect the public's health. Focusing on diverse partnerships as the framework for public health, the book discusses: The need for a shift from an individual to a population-based approach in practice, research, policy, and community engagement. The status of the governmental public health infrastructure and what needs to be improved, including its interface with the health care delivery system. The roles nongovernment actors, such as academia, business, local communities and the media can play in creating a healthy nation. Providing an accessible analysis, this book will be important to public health policy-makers and practitioners, business and community leaders, health advocates, educators and journalists.

This edited volume captures and communicates the best thinking on how to improve healthcare by improving the delivery of services -- providing care when and where it is needed most -- through application of state-of-the-art scheduling systems. Over 12 chapters, the authors cover aspects of setting appointments, allocating healthcare resources, and planning to ensure that capacity matches needs for care. A central theme of the book is increasing healthcare efficiency so that both the cost of care is reduced and more patients have access to care. This can be accomplished through reduction of idle time, lessening the time needed to provide services and matching resources to the needs where they can have the greatest possible impact on health. Within their chapters, authors address: (1) Use of scheduling to improve healthcare efficiency. (2) Objectives, constraints and mathematical formulations. (3) Key methods and techniques for creating schedules. (4) Recent developments that improve the available problem solving methods. (5) Actual applications, demonstrating how the methods can be used. (6) Future directions in which the field of research is heading. Collectively, the chapters provide a comprehensive state-of-the-art review of models and methods for scheduling the delivery of patient care for all parts of the healthcare system. Chapter topics include setting appointments for ambulatory care and outpatient procedures, surgical scheduling, nurse scheduling, bed management and allocation, medical supply logistics and routing and scheduling for home healthcare.

"The Nation has lost sight of its public health goals and has allowed the system of public health to fall into 'disarray'," from The Future of Public Health. This startling book contains proposals for ensuring that public health service programs are efficient and effective enough to deal not only with the topics of today, but also with those of tomorrow. In addition, the authors make recommendations for core functions in public health assessment, policy development, and service assurances, and identify the level of government--federal, state, and local--at which these functions would best be handled.

Integrating Social Care into the Delivery of Health Care: Moving Upstream to Improve the Nation's Health was released in September 2019, before the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic in March 2020. Improving social conditions remains critical to improving health outcomes, and integrating social care into health care delivery is more relevant than ever in the context of the pandemic and increased strains placed on the U.S. health care system. The report and its related products ultimately aim to help improve health and health equity, during COVID-19 and beyond. The consistent and compelling evidence on how social determinants shape health has led to a growing recognition throughout the health care sector that improving health and health equity is likely to depend â€" at least in part â€" on mitigating adverse social determinants. This recognition has been bolstered by a shift in the health care sector towards value-based payment, which incentivizes improved health outcomes for persons and populations rather than service delivery alone. The combined result of these changes has been a growing emphasis on health care systems addressing patients' social risk factors and social needs with the aim of improving health outcomes. This may involve health care systems linking individual patients with government and community social services, but important questions need to be answered about when and how health care systems should integrate social care into their practices and what kinds of infrastructure are required to facilitate such activities. Integrating Social Care into the Delivery of Health Care: Moving Upstream to Improve the Nation's Health examines the potential for integrating services addressing social needs and the social determinants of health into the delivery of health care to achieve better health outcomes. This report assesses approaches to social care integration currently being taken by health care providers and systems, and new or emerging approaches and opportunities; current roles in such integration by different disciplines and organizations, and new or emerging roles and types of providers; and current and emerging efforts to design health care systems to improve the nation's health and reduce health inequities.

The National Roundtable on Health Care Quality was established in 1995 by the Institute of Medicine. The Roundtable consists of experts formally appointed through procedures of the National Research Council (NRC) who represent both public and private-sector perspectives and appropriate areas of substantive expertise (not organizations). From the public sector, heads of appropriate Federal agencies serve. It offers a unique, nonadversarial environment to explore ongoing rapid changes in the medical marketplace and the implications of these changes for the quality of health and health care in this nation. The Roundtable has a liaison panel focused on quality of care in managed care organizations. The Roundtable convenes nationally prominent representatives of the private and public sector (regional, state and federal), academia, patients, and the health media to analyze unfolding issues concerning quality, to hold workshops and commission papers on significant topics, and when appropriate, to produce periodic statements for the nation on quality of care matters. By providing a structured opportunity for regular communication and interaction, the Roundtable fosters candid discussion among individuals who represent various sides of a given issue.