This book examines the important role of consumer activism in health policy in different national contexts. In an age of shifting boundaries between state and civil society, consumer groups are potentially drivers of democratisation in the health domain. The expert contributors explore how their activities bring new dynamics to relations between service providers, the medical profession, government agencies, and other policy actors. This book is unique in comprehensivelyanalysing the opportunities and dilemmas of this type of activism, including ambiguous partnerships between consumer groups and stakeholders such as the pharmaceutical industry. These themes are explored within aninternationally comparative framework, with case studies from various countries.

This book provides an account of milestone health insurance reforms that took place in Korea and Thailand, which significantly advanced equitable access and redistribution in health care. Thai and Korean welfare champions were deeply informed by their experiences as activists in their countries' democracy movements.

The process of user-centered innovation: how it can benefit both users and manufacturers and how its emergence will bring changes in business models and in public policy. Innovation is rapidly becoming democratized. Users, aided by improvements in computer and communications technology, increasingly can develop their own new products and services. These innovating users—both individuals and firms—often freely share their innovations with others, creating user-innovation communities and a rich intellectual commons. In Democratizing Innovation, Eric von Hippel looks closely at this emerging system of user-centered innovation. He explains why and when users find it profitable to develop new products and services for themselves, and why it often pays users to reveal their innovations freely for the use of all.The trend toward democratized innovation can be seen in software and information products—most notably in the free and open-source software movement—but also in physical products. Von Hippel's many examples of user innovation in action range from surgical equipment to surfboards to software security features. He shows that product and service development is concentrated among "lead users," who are ahead on marketplace trends and whose innovations are often commercially attractive. Von Hippel argues that manufacturers should redesign their innovation processes and that they should systematically seek out innovations developed by users. He points to businesses—the custom semiconductor industry is one example—that have learned to assist user-innovators by providing them with toolkits for developing new products. User innovation has a positive impact on social welfare, and von Hippel proposes that government policies, including R&D subsidies and tax credits, should be realigned to eliminate biases against it. The goal of a democratized user-centered innovation system, says von Hippel, is well worth striving for. An electronic version of this book is available under a Creative Commons license.

In the 1960s and 1970s, a wave of social movements permeated the American landscape; these pushes for change included the community health movement and the women's health movement. In considering these two health movements, I wondered if communities were better served by their new modes of healthcare delivery than they had been in the past? To explore this question more deeply, I choose two New England health centers as case sutdies for my thesis. The first clinic is a community health center in Dorchester, Massachusetts, which started in 1965. The second clinic, the New Hampshire Women's Health Services located in New Hampshire's capital, opened in 1974. I utilized oral interviews, newspaper articles, surveys conducted by non-profit organizations, and the feminist health center's quarterly publication to establish the histories of each health center. I then placed these narratives into the scholarship of each health movement. Although I initially planned on highlighting the avenues for empowerment created in these health movements, the use of a health social movements framework allowed me to underscore an even more prominent commonality between the two centers: the revived emphasis on experiential knowledge in the medical profession in the second half of the twentieth century.

Introduction; Four Case Studies of Democratic Reform; Lessons from the Four Case Studies; Linking Democratic Forms of of Governance to Progressive Health Care Reform in BC; Conclusion; ADDEND; A Proposal for Community Con ... ; Notes.

A wake-up call for America to create a new framework for democratizing data. Public data are foundational to our democratic system. People need consistently high-quality information from trustworthy sources. In the new economy, wealth is generated by access to data; government's job is to democratize the data playing field. Yet data produced by the American government are getting worse and costing more. In Democratizing Our Data, Julia Lane argues that good data are essential for democracy. Her book is a wake-up call to America to fix its broken public data system.

The field of health literacy has evolved from one focused on individuals to one that recognizes that health literacy is multidimensional. While communicating in a health literate manner is important for everyone, it is particularly important when communicating with those with limited health literacy who also experience more serious medication errors, higher rates of hospitalization and use of the emergency room, poor health outcomes, and increased mortality. Over the past decade, research has shown that health literacy interventions can significantly impact various areas including health care costs, outcomes, and health disparities. To understand the extent to which health literacy has been shown to be effective at contributing to the Quadruple Aim of improving the health of communities, providing better care, providing affordable care, and improving the experience of the health care team, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine convened a public workshop on building the case for health literacy. This publication summarizes the presentations and discussions from the workshop, and highlights important lessons about the role of health literacy in meeting the Quadruple Aim, case studies of organizations that have adopted health literacy, and discussions among the different stakeholders involved in making the case for health literacy.