This book brings together the best thinking from both sides of the Atlantic to explore the issues surrounding soaring health care costs. It employs disciplinary perspectives from economics, ethics, philosophy, psychology, clinical practice, and epidemiology to explore various ways that value for patients have and can be determined. A major section of the book discusses problems that can reduce the value to patients of medical care. The volume is must read for practitioners, policy makers, and researchers who want to find in one place the state-of-the-art thinking and future directions of valuing medical care from the patient’s perspective.

The digital transformation of healthcare delivery is in full swing. Health monitoring is increasingly becoming more effective, efficient, and timely through mobile devices that are now widely available. This, as well as wireless technology, is essential to assessing, diagnosing, and treating medical ailments. However, systems and applications that boost wellness must be properly designed and regulated in order to protect the patient and provide the best care. Optimizing Health Monitoring Systems With Wireless Technology is an essential publication that focuses on critical issues related to the design, development, and deployment of wireless technology solutions for healthcare and wellness. Highlighting a broad range of topics including solution evaluation, privacy and security, and policy and regulation, this book is ideally designed for clinicians, hospital directors, hospital managers, consultants, health IT developers, healthcare providers, engineers, software developers, policymakers, researchers, academicians, and students.

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 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.

From the Preface: Collectively, the chapters in this book address application domains including inpatient and outpatient services, public health networks, supply chain management, and resource constrained settings in developing countries. Many of the chapters provide specific examples or case studies illustrating the applications of operations research methods across the globe, including Africa, Australia, Belgium, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Chapters 1-4 review operations research methods that are most commonly applied to health care operations management including: queuing, simulation, and mathematical programming. Chapters 5-7 address challenges related to inpatient services in hospitals such as surgery, intensive care units, and hospital wards. Chapters 8-10 cover outpatient services, the fastest growing part of many health systems, and describe operations research models for primary and specialty care services, and how to plan for patient no-shows. Chapters 12 – 16 cover topics related to the broader integration of health services in the context of public health, including optimizing the location of emergency vehicles, planning for mass vaccination events, and the coordination among different parts of a health system. Chapters 17-18 address supply chain management within hospitals, with a focus on pharmaceutical supply management, and the challenges of managing inventory for nursing units. Finally, Chapters 19-20 provide examples of important and emerging research in the realm of humanitarian logistics.

"Nathan Tierney’s powerful storytelling is rarely seen in today’s health care business environment. We must redesign the health care delivery system---a team sport in service of patients, hold it accountable with measurement to improve outcomes, and quantify the resource costs over the full cycle of care. Value-based health care is a framework through which these goals are achieved, and Tierney provides a detailed playbook to get your organization there. Outlined in incredible detail and clarity, he presents core concepts and dives into the key metrics needed to build, maintain, and scale a successful value-based health care organization. Nathan shares a realistic vision of what any CEO should expect when developing their own Value Management Office. Nothing is more important to me than improving the lives of those I love. My personal mission is to create systemic change with an impact on the global stage. This playbook needs to be on the desk of every executive, clinician, and patient today." -Mahek Shah, MD, Senior Researcher and Senior Project Leader, Harvard Business School Our current healthcare system’s broken. The Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) predicts health care costs could increase from 6% to 14% of GDP by 2060. The cause of this increase is due to (1) a global aging population, (2) growing affluence, (3) rise in chronic diseases, and (4) better-informed patients; all of which raises the demand for healthcare. In 2006, Michael Porter and Elizabeth Teisberg authored the book ‘Redefining Health Care: Creating Value-Based Competition on Results.’ In it, they present their analysis of the root causes plaguing the health care industry and make the case for why providers, suppliers, consumers, and employers should move towards a patient-centric approach that optimizes value for patients. According to Porter, "value for patients should be the overarching principle for our broken system." Since 2006, Professor Porter, accompanied by his esteemed Harvard colleague, Profesor Robert Kaplan, have worked tirelessly to promote this new approach and pilot it with leading healthcare delivery organizations like Cleveland Clinic, Mayo Clinic, MD Anderson, and U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs. Given the current state of global healthcare, there is urgency to achieve widespread adoption of this new approach. The intent of this book is to equip all healthcare delivery organizations with a guide for putting the value-based concept into practice. This book defines the practice of value-based health care as Value Management. The book explores Profesor Porter’s Value Equation (Value = Outcomes/ Cost), which is central to Value Management, and provides a step-by-step process for how to calculate the components of this equation. On the outcomes side, the book presents the Value Realization Framework, which translates organizational mission and strategy into a comprehensive set of performance measures and contextualizes the measures for healthcare delivery. The Value Realization Framework is based on Professor Kaplan's ground-breaking Balanced Scorecard approach, but specific to healthcare organizations. On the costs side, the book details the Harvard endorsed time-driven activity based costing (TDABC) methodology, which has proven to be a modern catalyst for defining HDO costs. Finally, this book covers the need and a plan to establish a Value Management Office to lead the delivery transformation and govern operations. This book is designed in a format where any organization can read it and acquire the fundamentals and methodologies of Value Management. It is intended for healthcare delivery organizations in need of learning the specifics of achieving the implementation of value-based healthcare.

This book is dedicated to improving healthcare through reducing delays experienced by patients. With an interdisciplinary approach, this new edition, divided into five sections, begins by examining healthcare as an integrated system. Chapter 1 provides a hierarchical model of healthcare, rising from departments, to centers, regions and the “macro system.” A new chapter demonstrates how to use simulation to assess the interaction of system components to achieve performance goals, and Chapter 3 provides hands-on methods for developing process models to identify and remove bottlenecks, and for developing facility plans. Section 2 addresses crowding and the consequences of delay. Two new chapters (4 and 5) focus on delays in emergency departments, and Chapter 6 then examines medical outcomes that result from waits for surgeries. Section 3 concentrates on management of demand. Chapter 7 presents breakthrough strategies that use real-time monitoring systems for continuous improvement. Chapter 8 looks at the patient appointment system, particularly through the approach of advanced access. Chapter 9 concentrates on managing waiting lists for surgeries, and Chapter 10 examines triage outside of emergency departments, with a focus on allied health programs Section 4 offers analytical tools and models to support analysis of patient flows. Chapter 11 offers techniques for scheduling staff to match patterns in patient demand. Chapter 12 surveys the literature on simulation modeling, which is widely used for both healthcare design and process improvement. Chapter 13 is new and demonstrates the use of process mapping to represent a complex regional trauma system. Chapter 14 provides methods for forecasting demand for healthcare on a region-wide basis. Chapter 15 presents queueing theory as a method for modeling waits in healthcare, and Chapter 16 focuses on rapid delivery of medication in the event of a catastrophic event. Section 5 focuses on achieving change. Chapter 17 provides a diagnostic for assessing the state of a hospital and using the state assessment to select improvement strategies. Chapter 18 demonstrates the importance of optimizing care as patients transition from one care setting to the next. Chapter 19 is new and shows how to implement programs that improve patient satisfaction while also improving flow. Chapter 20 illustrates how to evaluate the overall portfolio of patient diagnostic groups to guide system changes, and Chapter 21 provides project management tools to guide the execution of patient flow projects.