Question

What role do you think the healthcare system should actually play in keeping people healthy ? (250 words essay )

AS a patient in the US healthcare system , what are some ways you think the healthcare system is failing to keep people healthy ? what are some ways it is succeeding? ( 300 words essay )

Answer 1

A health system, also sometimes referred to as health care system or as healthcare system, is the organization of people, institutions, and resources that deliver health care services to meet the health needs of target populations.

A “systems view” of health care and a brief description of the potential role of information/ communications systems.

The health care system is divided into four “nested” levels: (1) the individual patient; (2) the care team, which includes professional care providers (e.g., clinicians, pharmacists, and others), the patient, and family members; (3) the organization (e.g., hospital, clinic, nursing home, etc.) that supports the development and work of care teams by providing infrastructure and complementary resources; and (4) the political and economic environment (e.g., regulatory, financial, payment regimes, and markets), the conditions under which organizations, care teams, individual patients, and individual care providers operate.

The Individual Patient
The individual patient, whose needs and preferences should be the defining factors in a patient-centered health care system. Recent changes in health care policy reflect an emphasis on “consumer-driven” health care. The availability of information, the establishment of private health care spending accounts, and other measures reflect an increasing expectation that patients will drive changes in the system for improved quality, efficiency, and effectiveness. Overall, the role of the patient has changed from a passive recipient of care to a more active participant in care delivery.

At the same time, the fragmented delivery system, combined with the growing burden of chronic disease and the need for continuous care, have all but forced many patients to assume an active role in the design, coordination, “production,” and implementation of their care, whether they want to or not. Unfortunately, most people do not have access to the information, tools, and other resources they need to play this new role effectively. Considering the roles, needs, and objectives of first-level actors—individual patients—and their interdependencies with actors at other levels of the system, opportunities abound for using information/ communications technologies and systems-engineering tools to improve the overall performance of the health care system.

A starting point for increasing the “patient-centeredness” of health care delivery is changing the perspective of clinicians to consider patients and their families as “partners” and to incorporate their values and wishes into care processes. The level of responsibility patients and their families assume differs from patient to patient. Some prefer to delegate some, if not most, of the decision making to a trusted clinician/counselor in the care system; others want to be full partners in decision making. In either case, however, patients need a free exchange of information and communication with physician(s) and other members of the care team, as well as with the organizations that provide the supporting infrastructure for the care teams.

For patients to communicate “informed” needs and preferences, participate effectively in decision making, and coordinate, or at least monitor the coordination, of their care, they must have access to the same information streams—in “patient-accessible” form—as their physician(s) and care team. Information that supports evidence-based, effective, efficient care encompasses the patient's medical record, including real-time physiological data; the most up-to-date medical evidence base; and orders in process concerning the patient's care. The patient and/or his or her clinician/counselor or family member must also have access to educational, decision-support, information-management, and communication tools that can help them integrate critical information from different sources.

From the patient's perspective, improving the timeliness, convenience, effectiveness, and efficiency of care will require that the patient be interconnected to the health care system. Synchronous communication between patient and physician could improve the quality of care in a number of ways. For example, continuous, real-time communication of a patient's physiological data to care providers could accelerate the pace of diagnosis and treatment, thereby reducing complications and injuries that might result from delays. Remote (e.g., in-the-home, on-the-go) monitoring, diagnosis, and treatment would make care much more convenient for patients, save them time, and conceivably improve compliance with care regimes (see paper by Budinger in this volume). Communication technologies also have the potential to change the nature of the relationship between patient and provider, making it easier for patients to develop and maintain trusting relationships with their clinicians.

The Care Team
The care team, the second level of the health care system, consists of the individual physician and a group of care providers, including health professionals, patients' family members, and others, whose collective efforts result in the delivery of care to a patient or population of patients. The care team is the basic building block of a “clinical microsystem,” defined as “the smallest replicable unit within an organization [or across multiple organizations] that is replicable in the sense that it contains within itself the necessary human, financial, and technological resources to do its work”.

In addition to the care team, a clinical microsystem includes a defined patient population; an information environment that supports the work of professional and family caregivers and patients; and support staff, equipment, and facilities. Ideally, the role of the microsystem is to “standardize care where possible, based on best current evidence; to stratify patients based on medical need and provide the best evidence-based care within each stratum; and to customize care to meet individual needs for patients with complex health problems”.

The role and needs of individual physicians have undergone changes parallel to those of individual patients. The exponential increase in medical knowledge, the proliferation of medical specialties, and the rising burden of providing chronic care have radically undercut the autonomy of individual physicians and required that they learn to work as part of care teams, either in a single institution/organization or across institutional settings. The slow adaptation of individual clinicians to team-based health care has been influenced by several factors, including a lack of formal training in teamwork techniques, a persistent culture of professional autonomy in medicine, and the absence of tools, infrastructure, and incentives to facilitate the change.

To participate in, let alone lead and orchestrate, the work of a care team and maintain the trust of the patient, the physician must have on-demand access to critical clinical and administrative information, as well as information-management, communication, decision-support, and educational tools to synthesize, analyze, and make the best use of that information. Moreover, to deliver patient-centered care (i.e., care based on the patient's needs and preferences), the physician must be equipped and educated to serve as trusted advisor, educator, and counselor, as well as medical expert, and must know how to encourage the patient's participation in the design and delivery of care.

For care teams to become truly patient-centered, the rules of engagement between care teams and patients must be changed. Like individual care providers, the care team must become more responsive to the needs and preferences of patients and involve them and their families (to the extent they desire) in the design and implementation of care. Care teams must provide patients with continuous, convenient, timely access to quality care. One member of the care team must be responsible for ensuring effective communication and coordination between the patient and other members of the care team.

The Organization
The third level of the health care system is the organization (e.g., hospital, clinic, nursing home) that provides infrastructure and other complementary resources to support the work and development of care teams and microsystems. The organization is a critical lever of change in the health care system because it can “provide an overall climate and culture for change through its various decision-making systems, operating systems, and human resource practices”. The organization encompasses the decision-making systems, information systems, operating systems, and processes (financial, administrative, human-resource, and clinical) to coordinate the activities of multiple care teams and supporting units and manage the allocation and flow of human, material, and financial resources and information in support of care teams. The organization is the business level, the level at which most investments are made in information systems and infrastructure, process-management systems, and systems tools.

Health care organizations face many challenges. In response to the escalating cost of health care, government and industry—the third-party payers for most people—have shifted a growing share of the cost burden back to care providers and patients in recent years. As a result, hospitals and ambulatory care facilities are under great pressure to accomplish more work with fewer people to keep revenues ahead of rising costs.

In certain respects, management of health care organizations is not well positioned to respond to mounting cost and quality crises. Compared to other industries, health care has evolved with little shaping by the visible hands of management. Historically, most leaders of health care organizations were initially trained in medicine or public health. Moreover, except in the relatively few integrated, corporate provider organizations (e.g., Kaiser-Permanente, Mayo Clinic, et al.), the management of most hospitals faces the challenge of “managing” clinicians, the majority of whom function as “independent agents.”

To support patient-centered care delivery by well functioning clinical care teams or microsystems, health organizations must find ways to bridge the health care professional/ delivery system management divide and invest in information/ communications technologies, systems-engineering tools, and associated knowledge. Integrated, patient-centered, team-based care requires material, managerial, logistical, and technical support that can cross organizational/institutional boundaries—support that is very difficult to provide in a highly fragmented, distributed-care delivery system.

The Political and Economic Environment
The fourth and final level of the health care system is the political, economic (or market) environment, which includes regulatory, financial, and payment regimes and entities that influence the structure and performance of health care organizations directly and, through them, all other levels of the system. Many actors influence the political and economic environment for health care. The federal government influences care through the reimbursement practices of Medicare/ Medicaid, through regulation of private-payer and provider organizations, and through its support for the development and use of selected diagnostic and therapeutic interventions (e.g., drugs, devices, equipment, and procedures). State governments, which play a major role in the administration of Medicaid, also influence care systems. Private-sector purchasers of health care, particularly large corporations that contract directly with health care provider organizations and third-party payers (e.g., health plans and insurance companies), are also important environment-level actors, in some cases reimbursing providers for services not covered by the federal government.

Federal regulations influence the structure, level, and nature of competition among providers and insurers. They can also affect the transparency of the health care system by setting requirements related to patient safety and other aspects of the quality of care. By exercising its responsibility to monitor, protect, and improve public health, the federal government shapes the market environment for health care. Federal agencies, the primary sources of funding for biomedical research, influence the research and technological trajectories of health care, and, with them, the education of health care professionals and professionals in other areas invested in the health care enterprise.

At present, many factors and forces at the environmental level, including reimbursement schemes for health care services and some regulatory policies, do not support the goals and objectives of patient-centered, high-performance health care organizations or the health care delivery system as a whole. Although the federal government, the single largest purchaser of health care services, principal regulator, and major research patron, is, in many ways, best positioned to drive changes in the health care delivery system, some private-sector payer organizations and state governments are better positioned to experiment with new mechanisms and incentives for improving the quality of care and making health care more affordable.