As health care costs soar there is increasing interest in examining what society and, particularly, patients receive in return for these expenditures. Optimizing Health brings together the best thinking from both sides of the Atlantic to explore these issues. 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. It concludes with a discussion of changes required in practice, research, and health care systems to maximize the outcomes received from the provision of medical care services from the patient's perspective.
The first section of the book provides theoretical perspectives from economics and systems thinking that help us to focus on how one might determine the value of medical care for patients. The next section considers the ethical and philosophical dilemmas that face developed countries in distributing medical care. How is justice served and evidence-based medicine employed to increase the value of medical care for patients?
The section on psychology deals with measuring outcomes from the patient's perspective and involving patients in medical decision making. Measuring quality of life and gaining valid quality of life information when patients cannot respond for themselves are important topics covered by these chapters. Other chapters consider ways that patients can become more involved in medical decision making with the expectation that this will increase the value of medical care for patients.
A major section of the book about clinical practice discusses problems that can reduce the value to patients of medical care. These include overdiagnosis, aggressive treatments that do not result in better patient outcomes, findings that earlier diagnosis does not always result in better outcomes, and the extent of medical error in treatment.
The final sections deal withcost-effectiveness analyses and applications of clinical epidemiology. The chapters include a number of original investigations and applications of new methodologies. All-in-all, the volume is must reading 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.
Are our patients getting what they want for their health care money?
Should we change anything to give our patients more of what they want?
Do we even know what they want?
When service delivery, patient expectations, and the bottom line are in conflict, quality generally suffers. But such conflict can be minimized, say the editors of Optimizing Health.
Answering elusive questions on how quality emerges in medical care, Franz Porzsolt and Robert Kaplan synthesize findings from closely interrelated aspects of clinical practice, clinical epidemiology, health economics, psychology, and ethics. The resulting systems perspective of this timely book merges thinking from clinical medicine and economics to form the hybrid term "CLINECS". The book challenges readers to rethink the standard criteria for assessing benefit to patients, and shows how evidence-based medicine can be incorporated into actual public health settings, clarifying key medical goals regarding patient autonomy. An international panel of experts offers practical, workable guidelines for:
-Understanding the value of services from the patient's point of view
-Involving patients in medical decision-making
-Avoiding overdiagnosis and overly aggressive treatment
-Reconciling outcomes research and clinical research
-Measuring patient quality of life-even for those who are cognitively impaired
-Improving efficacy and effectiveness throughout the system
Optimizing Health outlines an agenda of critical importance to health care professionals, researchers, and policymakers. This vision also makes it a bedrock graduate-level text for tomorrow's clinicians andadministrators. This is material that will be studied, discussed, debated, but most of all, benefited from.
