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 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.

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.

Healthcare is constantly evolving, with ever increasing complexity and costs presenting huge challenges for policy making, decision making, and system design. Design for Care presents an overview of the design issues facing healthcare and shows how designers can work with practice professionals, patients, caregivers, and other stakeholders to make a positive difference. Case studies, design methods, and leading-edge research illuminate emerging opportunities and provide inspiration for designing better services. (bron: rosenfeldmedia.com).

Process Redesign for Health Care Using Lean Thinking is a response to a simple, but hard to answer, question and is the result of the experiences of a working doctor who was also the chief safety and quality officer of an Australian teaching hospital. At this hospital, he observed that the Emergency Department was staff by talented, well-trained, and respected doctors and nurses. The facilities were modern, and the work load unexceptional, but the department was close to melt down. Bad things were happening to patients, everyone was blaming each other, lots of things had been tried but nothing was getting better and no one could explain why. The problem was not a lack of technical knowledge or expertise, the problem was that no one stood back and said, "what's the best way to move 200 or 300 patients a day through the complicated and varying, sequence of steps needed to sort out the many different problems that bring patients to our department?" These challenges are faced by hospitals and health services all over the world. There are difficulties with patient flow, congestion, queues, inefficient utilization of resources, problems engaging clinical staff in improvement programs, adverse incidents, and budget constraints. Lean thinking and value stream analysis gives hospitals and health services struggling with these issues the insights they need to help themselves. This book provides a method that systematically turns those insights into working programs of service and system redesign. The book is divided into two sections. The first section gives the background to the approach, and systematically works through the Process Redesign methodology, step-by-step. The second section is a series of case studies that show the methodology in action, what worked and what didn't work. The goal of any process redesign is simple: the right care, for the right person, at the right time, in the right place, and right the first time. This book helps the people who work in hospitals and health services realize these goals by working together.

The Institute of Medicine study Crossing the Quality Chasm (2001) recommended that an interdisciplinary summit be held to further reform of health professions education in order to enhance quality and patient safety. Health Professions Education: A Bridge to Quality is the follow up to that summit, held in June 2002, where 150 participants across disciplines and occupations developed ideas about how to integrate a core set of competencies into health professions education. These core competencies include patient-centered care, interdisciplinary teams, evidence-based practice, quality improvement, and informatics. This book recommends a mix of approaches to health education improvement, including those related to oversight processes, the training environment, research, public reporting, and leadership. Educators, administrators, and health professionals can use this book to help achieve an approach to education that better prepares clinicians to meet both the needs of patients and the requirements of a changing health care system.