Just about everybody who’s ever needed health care in the United States

Has seen firsthand the problems that make the system inefficient, costly, and often unsatisfying.

The nonpartisan Institute of Medicine just put out a 450-page report about the problems in the United States health care system along with some ideas for improvements.

How To Fix Health Care in The United States

The United States health care system has become too complex and costly to continue business as usual. News reports on the United States and how to fix health caregiving the best care with Information Technology.

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 create an urgent need for a system-wide transformation. According to the report about 30 percent of health spending in 2009, roughly $750 billion, was wasted on unnecessary services, excessive administrative costs, fraud, and other problems.

The biggest fact is 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 United States citizen has 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.

The report Best Care at Lower Cost emphasizes that 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 own care.

Money’s not the only issue. Poor quality hurts patients.

The report, called “best care at lower cost” explains how this can be changed.

This report offers some suggestions for improving our system of care. Better use of technology, such as the widespread adoption of computerized medical records and mobile devices, would help us a lot.

Report: The Path to Continuously Learning Health Care in America
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