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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.
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