From heathcare to health

Asch DA, Volpp KG. What business are we in? The emergence of health as the business of health care. N Engl J Med. 2012 Sep 6;367(10):888-9. 
This is a must read article on trends in healthcare that could make a huge difference to MSers.

Excerpts:

".....health care is that whereas doctors and hospitals focus on producing health care, what people really want is health. Health care is just a means to that end — and an increasingly expensive one. If we could get better health some other way, just as we can now produce images without film and transport people and freight without railroads, then maybe we wouldn't have to rely so much on health care."

"..... An enormous body of literature supports the view that differences in health are determined as much by the social circumstances that underlie them as by the biologic processes that mediate them...."

"......in the past there was some implicit presumption that doctors and hospitals provide health care of consistently high quality, that presumption is now being challenged, and we're getting much better at identifying, measuring, reporting, and targeting health outcomes. ....."

"......In the future, successful doctors, hospitals, and health systems will shift their activities from delivering health services within their walls toward a broader range of approaches that deliver health. ......"


"My model of the future with regard to providing health / healthcare to MSers is not to dissimilar to some of the concepts being explained in this paper. The current hospital-based system is broken and in need of an overhaul. Let's see how things develop over the next few years."

Other related posts:

08 Sep 2012
There are numerous sources of inefficiency in US health care ranging from administrative complexity to lack of price information and incentives for patients as well as scientific uncertainty about effectiveness and costs, ...
11 Jul 2012
"The dominant form of health care financing in the United States supports a reactive, visit-based model in which patients are seen when they become ill, typically during hospitalizations and at outpatient visits. .... The NHS is more than willing to now fund the removal and replacement of vain women with fake boobs as a result of unproven worries regarding leakage, yet us MSers with walking problems who are on no medication are deprived potent treatments on cost ...

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