This revised edition of Arnold Birenbaum's important book brings the work up to date through the end of 1994 and the close of the 103rd Congress. It offers a comprehensive, provocative, and completely new assessment of health care reform with a focus on financing and coverage. A fine primer...on the health care debate (JAMA), the book examines such topics as the changing doctor-patient relationship, the growth of managed care, the rise and decline of hospitals, American business and health benefits, and the uninsured in America. This new edition takes particular heed to the failure of health care reform in 1994. In responding to the first edition, Victor Sidel, M.D., former president of the American Public Health Association, called it, "A wonderfully far-ranging, meticulously documented, insightfully analyzed and remarkably well written challenge to professionals, patients, and community members to work for effective change in a bizarre, expensive, inefficient, and often unresponsive medical care system."

From exotic spa treatments to euthanasia, this book examines the background and social context of medical tourism-the practice of traveling for health care. This work also documents how this industry is reshaping the face of medicine worldwide for individuals, local communities, and national health care systems. Medical Tourism: A Reference Handbook provides an accessible overview of the state of medical tourism, written from a balanced, unbiased perspective. The authors provide relevant social context for this controversial topic, discussing the state of extremely limited research data on medical tourism; the ethical issues involved, such as traveling to have a black-market organ transplanted; and the significant impact of medical tourism on health care systems-that of the United States, and those of the destination countries. The book highlights many contemporary problems, controversies, and implications of medical tourism both for individuals and health care systems, and presents thought-provoking potential solutions. The topic of medical tourism is also addressed against the backdrop of current healthcare reforms in the United States. Readers can reference a wealth of additional material on medical tourism, ranging from original documents to extensive directories of selected organizations and resources. A timeline of important historical and contemporary events in history of medical tourism An extensive bibliography to assist readers toward additional resources for further research

Gabriel of Urantia asked the question, in the beginning of his struggle with dialysis, "God, why is this happening to me?" Throughout his 8-month dialysis experience, 3 days a week, 4 hours a day, being tied down to a chair while his blood flowed from his body through a machine and back, he realizes-from the people he meets also on dialysis and in the hospitals after post-kidney-transplant-that very bad things happen to very good people. He met young and old alike, tied down to the machines just like he was, and the young people were the hardest for him to resolve in his mind with God and also to try to give them hope. As a minister, he felt obligated to do so. Being a Pastor of a church (Global Community Communications Alliance-a very social, environmental, and spiritual activist church), he knew that bad things happened to good people who try to change the world. But this disease is personal, between him and God you might say. So he had to discover for himself why God allowed this to happen to him and to the other very good people he met with various traumatic illnesses in the hospitals and dialysis centers. Gabriel of Urantia tries to explain how he felt along the path, from the beginning to the receiving of his new kidney from his 22-year-old daughter and gaining the hope and health to continue not only his spiritual work, but his work as a musician, guitar player, and singer (in which he was planning a tour around the country with his 11-piece Bright & Morning Star Band), while now taking immunosuppressant drugs to keep him alive. He had all the fears that a new transplant patient has. How long will the kidney last? What other affects do these drugs have on my body? He writes about his experience with the medical world, the services he experienced from both very qualified people and those not so qualified (experienced and inexperienced care givers), as well as the bureaucracy of the medical field and insurance companies (both private and governmental). He realized that often in the medical field, the right hand didn't know what the left hand was doing and the patient suffered the results. Beyond that, Gabriel of Urantia tries to give hope to people with life-threatening illnesses by sharing his faith in the Creator to all who may read his book. A must-read for anyone on dialysis or with any life-threatening illness, from a writer who went through this and can identify with what they are going through and give them hope through this trauma in their lives.

Designed for easy reference, this concise manual provides hospital board members and executives with practical guidance on how to become actively engaged in the transformation of their organization. It focuses on how the healthcare industry as a whole is transforming and stresses the importance of having board members who are knowledgeable and skilled enough to provide leadership during this time of great opportunity. This manual is ideal for orienting new board members and for providing more experienced members with insight on key issues. It supplies a list of questions to ask stakeholders that will facilitate engagement and ultimately encourage participation. Each of the chapters is organized around action steps referred to as Top Healthcare Transformers. These are designed to disseminate best practices, build organizational quality, establish transparency, and develop the culture and leadership needed to facilitate change that is intelligent and progressive. Each of those 10 chapters includes - The Problem: A brief, quantitative look at the problem The Transformer: What will transform and make healthcare different Best Practices: Examples of current best practices indicative of the transformer Board Questions: Questions every board member should consider asking and every executive should be prepared to answer A concluding chapter provides the overall governance engagement checklist-the things to do to make certain that board members and senior colleagues are engaged and prepared to lead your organization's transformation. Includes a foreword by John R. Combes, MD, President and Chief Operating Officer, Center for Healthcare Governance

One of the most urgent issues facing the United States today is how to establish a comprehensive health insurance program at a time when nearly one in seven Americans lack insurance and costs for health care and medical fees are increasing at about 20 percent annually. An interdisciplinary team of experts provides a unique overview of the most important current problems and speaks to the key questions of risk, allocation, and equity. This text is designed for college, university, and professional courses in health and medical policy, public policy, public administration, law and society, bioethics, nursing, science and technology, and hospital administration. This public policy study offers a general framework for assessing health insurance from many vantage points, in terms of health policy impacts, the care of the needy, health insurance implementation, and prevention and risk. Chapters assess various national health insurance proposals, current congressional action and Medicare decisions, the social impacts of health insurance policy, coverage for displaced workers, the uninsured and hospital care in the inner city, charity care and community benefits, insuring high-risk persons, preventive health care screening for older women, and medical malpractice insurance, among other subjects. These analyses with real-life examples provide a solid introduction to all who want to understand health insurance and public policy issues today.

All over the world, women are organizing to improve their status in society and to better their health and health care. Women's activism is rooted in the global context of resource inequities between the North and the South and among genders, races, and classes within countries. Women fight for better health services and struggle with the pharmaceutical industry, and their responses to the violence they experience are at the very heart of their health movements. Most women organize first around demands for reproductive rights, and then expand to question care for the mentally ill, disabled, and malnourished.

Healthcare organizations depend on managers to build effective peer relationships to manage complex patient needs. Today, top management is fighting the many headed monster Hydra from Greek Mythology. The organization is steeped in conflict between peers. But, as soon as one problem is resolved, two more have grown in its place. These appear to be personal conflicts, but instead follow patterns of dysfunction. This book provides the conceptual frameworks for identifying these and for developing peer to peer relationship competence in the healthcare organization.

This book aims to identify, understand and qualify barriers to the patient-centred knowledge sharing (KS) in interprofessional practice of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) and Western Medicine (WM) healthcare professionals in Chinese hospitals. This collaboration is particularly crucial and unique to China since, contrary to Western practice, these two types of professionals actually work together complimentary in the same hospital. This study adopted a Grounded Theory approach as the overarching methodology to guide the analysis of the data collected in a single case-study design. A public hospital in central China was selected as the case-study site, at which 49 informants were interviewed by using semi-structured and evolving interview scripts. The research findings point to five categories of KS barriers: contextual influences, hospital management, philosophical divergence, Chinese healthcare education and interprofessional training. Further conceptualising the research findings, it is identified that KS is mostly prevented by philosophical and professional tensions between the two medical communities. Therefore, to improve KS and reduce the effects of the identified barriers, efforts should be made targeted at resolving both types of tensions. The conclusion advocates the establishment of national policies and hospital management strategies aimed at maintaining equality of the two medical communities and putting in place an interprofessional common ground to encourage and facilitate communication and KS.

There are more than 80 different sleep disorders including insomnia, sleep apnea, restless leg syndrome, hypersomnia, circadian rhythm disorders, and parasomnia. Good sleep is necessary for optimal health and can affect hormone levels and weight. The use of artificial intelligence (AI) and biomedical signals and images can help in healthcare diagnostics that are related to these and other sleep disorders. Advancing the Investigation and Treatment of Sleep Disorders Using AI presents an overview of sleep disorders based on machine intelligence methods in order to learn and explore the latest advancements, developments, methods, systems, futuristic approaches, and algorithms towards sleep disorders and to address their challenges. This book also discusses recent and future advancements in various feature extraction techniques and machine learning methods. Covering topics such as biomedical signal processing, augmented reality for clinical investigation, and sleep disorder detection, this book is essential for sleep medicine practitioners, clinical psychologists, psychiatrists, medical technologists, doctors, IT specialists, biomedical engineers, researchers, graduate students, and academicians.

This publication identifies and discusses important challenges affecting eHealth in the EU and North America in the three areas of law, ethics and governance. It makes meaningful contributions to the eHealth discourse by suggesting solutions and making recommendations for good practice and potential ways forward. Legal challenges discussed include issues related to electronic medical records, telemedicine, the Internet and pharmaceutical drugs, healthcare information systems and medical liability. Ethical challenges focus on telehealth and service delivery in the home, Web 2.0 and the Internet, patient perceptions and ethical frameworks. Governance challenges focus on IT governance in healthcare, governance and decision-making in acute care hospitals, and different models of eHealth governance. The publication provides useful support materials and readings for persons active in developing current understandings of the legal, ethical and governance challenges involved in the eHealth context.

In India today only 35 percent of people have access to medicines. This book examines the rise of drug prices in India, and develops a new healthcare model, which if implemented, would extend access to medicines to India's entire population. Sensitivity tests show that the proposed model is affordable, equitable and implementable

You Don't Have to Do It Alone

Whether you're prepared for it or not, chances are you'll take on the role of caregiver when a family member or friend is affected by a serious illness or injury, or when you find your elderly parent needs help. As you'll soon discover, the range of tasks and responsibilities involved are overwhelming. "Share The Care" offers a sensible and loving solution: a unique group approach that can turn a circle of ordinary people into a powerful caregiving team. "Share The Care" shows you how to:

• Create a caregiver "family" from friends, real family members, neighbors, coworkers, and acquaintances.
• Hold a meeting to organize your group, and introduce members to the Share The Care systems that guarantee every job will be done and no one person will have to do too much.
• Discover the hidden talents within the group, make the most of their resources, cope with group issues, and stay together in the face of adversity.

Included here are valuable guidelines, compassionate suggestions, and a simple-to-use workbook section that together offer support to free the patient from worry and the caregivers from burnout. "Share The Care" offers friends and family the best answer ever to the frequently asked question "What can I do?"

This book covers the scope of current knowledge of cancer in the LGBT community across the entire cancer continuum, from understanding risk and prevention strategies in LGBT groups, across issues of diagnosis and treatment of LGBT patients, to unique aspects of survivorship and death and dying in these communities. Each chapter includes an in depth analysis of the state of the science, discusses the many remaining challenges and unanswered questions and makes recommendations for research, policy and programmatic strategies required to address these. Focus is also placed on the diversity of the LGBT communities. Issues that are unique to cancer in LGBT populations are addressed including the social, economic and cultural factors that affect cancer risk behaviors, barriers to screening, utilization of health care services, and legislation that directly impacts the health care of LGBT patients, healthcare settings that are heterosexist and unique aspects of patient-provider relationships such as disclosure of sexual orientation and the need for inclusion of expanded definition of family to include families of choice. The implications of policy change, its impact on healthcare for LGBT patients are highlighted, as are the remaining challenges that need to be addressed. A roadmap for LGBT cancer prevention, detection, diagnosis, survivorship, including treatment and end of life care is offered for future researchers, policy makers, advocates and health care providers.

A Proactive Framework for Organizational Change

Learn to apply the principles of total quality management to the management of high-risk patients and improve quality of care, patient outcomes-and the bottom line.

"Finally, a model of managed health care that resonates with physicians and patients. A new direction for care management that makes sense on both humanitarian and financial grounds."--Sanford T. Kurtz, M.D., vice president and chief medical officer, Lahey Clinic

"An exciting, promising, practical, and brand new approach to solving the cost/quality dilemma in managed care--high-risk population health management. This well thought-out program focuses on managing patients, not physicians."--Stuart Baker, M.D., executive vice president of clinical affairs, Voluntary Hospital Association

Amid a welter of simultaneous policy initiatives in the UK, health treatment centers were a top-down National Health Service (NHS) innovation that became subverted into a multiplicity of solutions to different local problems. This book is a highly readable account of how and why these centers evolved with completely unforeseen results, revealing clear practical lessons based on UK case-study research involving over 200 interviews. By following the case studies through each key stage of reform, the book tells the story of NHS reform in action. Well-structured and clearly written, it uncovers a range of difficulties and conflicts in pushing forward wide-sweeping reforms at a local level, and it outlines the practical lessons to be learned.

This book encourages health professionals to reconceptualise their practice in the light of the fact that their patients are deteriorating and dying, supporting them in their dichotomous role which involves affirming that person's life whilst acknowledging that that life is ending. Professionals are encouraged to think laterally, to be creative in their use of their core skills, and to use their life skills and experience to change the focus of their interventions. By making these changes, those involved with caring for the dying will be able to address issues related to burnout and feeling de-skilled. The authors share their considerable experience with the reader - what works for both patient and carer/professional when working in this field. By providing workable solutions, they empower those in disempowering situations, such as when working with terminally ill children and adults. The book is truly holistic and client-centred in its approach, upholding the philosophy of palliative care. Aimed at all who interact with children and adults who have a life-limiting condition or who are dying Offers practical examples of approaches to dilemmas and emotional issues commonly face by those working in palliative care Encourages professionals to think laterally, to be creative in their use of core skills, and to use their life skills and experience to change the focus of their interventions Moves the emphasis away from the medical model to the emotional and spiritual influences on quality of life Offers clear, workable guidelines and demonstrates practical solutions, based on proven theory and experience, to problems encountered on a day-to-day basis by patients and those coming into contact with them

The greatest public health victories of the last century - public sanitation, vehicle safety measures, limits on smoking and tobacco use - have all been facilitated by public policies. While policy is an unparalleled tool for effecting change in public health, most professionals are unprepared to plan, apply, or study policy in a consequential way. Prevention, Policy, and Public Health provides a basic foundation for students, professionals, and researchers to be more effective in the policy arena. It offers information on the dynamics of the policymaking process, theoretical frameworks, analysis, and policy applications. It also offers tools for advocacy and communication, two integral aspects of shaping policies for public health. Organized around the leading risk factors for premature death and supplemented with illustrative case study examples, this book will help professionals and researchers understand the dimensions of policy, which can in turn inform the conduct of research and evaluation. These skills, combined with an understanding of opportunities and limitations within governments, can be highly applicable to designing effective policies and programs. With current pressures to implement broad and sustainable public health improvements, policies are more important than ever for anyone in the study and practice of public health. This book can be considered a primer to truly understanding the connection between prevention, policy, and public health.

Each day, new applications and methods are developed for utilizing technology in the field of medical sciences, both as diagnostic tools and as methods for patients to access their medical information through their personal gadgets. However, the maximum potential for the application of new technologies within the medical field has not yet been realized. Mobile Devices and Smart Gadgets in Medical Sciences is a pivotal reference source that explores different mobile applications, tools, software, and smart gadgets and their applications within the field of healthcare. Covering a wide range of topics such as artificial intelligence, telemedicine, and oncology, this book is ideally designed for medical practitioners, mobile application developers, technology developers, software experts, computer engineers, programmers, ICT innovators, policymakers, researchers, academicians, and students.

The Oxford Handbook of Health Economics provides an accessible and authoritative guide to health economics, intended for scholars and students in the field, as well as those in adjacent disciplines including health policy and clinical medicine. The chapters stress the direct impact of health economics reasoning on policy and practice, offering readers an introduction to the potential reach of the discipline.
Contributions come from internationally-recognized leaders in health economics and reflect the worldwide reach of the discipline. Authoritative, but non-technical, the chapters place great emphasis on the connections between theory and policy-making, and develop the contributions of health economics to problems arising in a variety of institutional contexts, from primary care to the operations of health insurers. The volume addresses policy concerns relevant to health systems in both developed and developing countries. It takes a broad perspective, with relevance to systems with single or multi-payer health insurance arrangements, and to those relying predominantly on user charges; contributions are also included that focus both on medical care and on non-medical factors that affect health. Each chapter provides a succinct summary of the current state of economic thinking in a given area, as well as the author's unique perspective on issues that remain open to debate. The volume presents a view of health economics as a vibrant and continually advancing field, highlighting ongoing challenges and pointing to new directions for further progress.

Everyone knows the old adage, "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure," but we seem not to live by it. In the Western world's health care it is commonly observed that prevention is underfunded while treatment attracts greater overall priority. This book explores this observation by examining the actual spending on prevention, the history of health policies and structural features that affect prevention's apparent relative lack of emphasis, the values that may justify priority for treatment or for prevention, and the religious and cultural traditions that have shaped the moral relationship between these two types of care.
Economists, scholars of public health and preventive medicine, philosophers, lawyers, and religious ethicists contribute specific sophisticated discussions. Their descriptions and claims lean in various directions and are often surprising. For example, the imbalance between prevention and treatment may not be as great as is often thought, and we may be spending excessively on many preventive measures just as we do on treatments compelled by the felt demands of rescue. A standard practice in health economics that disadvantages prevention, "discounting" the value of future lives, may rest on weak empirical and moral grounds. And it is an "apocalyptic" religious tradition (Seventh-day Adventism) whose members have put some of the strongest and most effective priority on long-term prevention.
Prevention vs. Treatment is distinctive in carefully clarifying the nature of the empirical and moral debates about the proper balance of prevention and treatment; the book pursues those debates from a wide range of perspectives, many not often heard from in health policy.

The first English hospitals appeared soon after the Norman Conquest. By the year 1300 they numbered over 500, caring for the sick and needy at every level of society - from the gentry and clergy to pilgrims, travellers, beggars and lepers. Excluded from towns, but placed by main highways where they could gather alms, they had a complex relationship with medieval society: cherished yet marginalised, self-contained yet also parasitic. This book - the first general history of medieval and Tudor hospitals in eighty-five years - traces when and why they originated and follows their development through the crisis periods of the Black Death and the English Reformation when many disappeared. Nicholas Orme and Margaret Webster explore the hospitals' religious, charitable and medical functions, examine their buildings, staffing and finances, and analyse their inmates in terms of social background and medical needs. They reconstruct the daily life of hospitals, from worship to living conditions, food and care. The general survey is complemented by a regional study of hospitals in the south-west of England, including detailed histories of all the recorded institutions in Cornwall and Devon.