Management
Building a Better Delivery System
American medicine defines the cutting edge in most fields of clinical research, training, and practice worldwide, and U.S.-based manufacturers of drugs, medical devices, and medical equipment are among the most innovative and competitive in the world. In large part, the United States has achieved primacy in these areas by focusing public and private resources on research in the life and physical sciences and on the engineering of devices, instruments, and equipment to serve individual patients. At the same time, relatively little technical talent or material resources have been devoted to improving or optimizing the operations or measuring the quality and productivity of the overall U.S. health care system. The costs of this collective inattention and the failure to take advantage of the tools, knowledge, and infrastructure that have yielded quality and productivity revolutions in many other sectors of the American economy have been enormous. The $1.6 trillion health care sector is now mired in deep crises related to safety, quality, cost, and access that pose serious threats to the health and welfare of many Americans (IOM, 2000, 2001, 2004a,b,c).
No copy data
No other version available