America's health care system has become too complex and costly to continue business as usual. Best Care at Lower Cost explains that inefficiencies, an overwhelming amount of data, and other economic and quality barriers hinder progress in improving health and threaten the nation's economic stability and global competitiveness. According to this report, the knowledge and tools exist to put the health system on the right course to achieve continuous improvement and better quality care at a lower cost.The costs of the system's current inefficiency underscore the urgent need for a systemwide transformation. About 30 percent of health spending in 2009--roughly $750 billion--was wasted on unnecessary services, excessive administrative costs, fraud, and other problems. Moreover, inefficiencies cause needless suffering. By one estimate, roughly 75,000 deaths might have been averted in 2005 if every state had delivered care at the quality level of the best performing state. This report states that the way health care providers currently train, practice, and learn new information cannot keep pace with the flood of research discoveries and technological advances.About 75 million Americans have more than one chronic condition, requiring coordination among multiple specialists and therapies, which can increase the potential for miscommunication, misdiagnosis, potentially conflicting interventions, and dangerous drug interactions. Best Care at Lower Cost emphasizes that a better use of data is a critical element of a continuously improving health system, such as mobile technologies and electronic health records that offer significant potential to capture and share health data better. In order for this to occur, the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, IT developers, and standard-setting organizations should ensure that these systems are robust and interoperable. Clinicians and care organizations should fully adopt these technologies, and patients should be encouraged to use tools, such as personal health information portals, to actively engage in their care.This book is a call to action that will guide health care providers; administrators; caregivers; policy makers; health professionals; federal, state, and local government agencies; private and public health organizations; and educational institutions.

Best Care at Lower Cost: The Path to Continuously Learning Health Care in America

Randomized control trial

This paper presents a set of indicators to assess health care system performance. It also presents new comparative data on health care policies and institutions for OECD countries. This set of indicators allows the empirical characterisation of health care systems and the identification of groups of countries sharing similar health institutions. It also helps to uncover strengths and weaknesses of each country’s health care system and assessing the scope for improving value-for-money. The empirical analysis suggests that there is room in all countries surveyed to improve the effectiveness of health care spending; there is no health care system that performs systematically better in delivering cost-effective health care – big-bang reforms are therefore not warranted; increasing the coherence of policy settings, by adopting best policy practices within a similar system and borrowing the most appropriate elements from other systems will likely be more practical and effective to raise health care spending efficiency.

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Health Care Systems: Efficiency and Institutions

Addressing endogeneity in operations management research: Recent developments, common problems, and directions for future research

US Hospitalizations for Malignant Pleural Effusions: Data From the 2012 National Inpatient Sample

Objective
To review and characterize existing health care efficiency measures in order to facilitate a common understanding about the adequacy of these methods.

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Susan S Chen

Papers

A systematic review of health care efficiency measures.