Optimizing Health: Improving the Value of Healthcare Delivery

As health care costs soar there is increasing interest in examining what society and, particularly, patients receive in return for these expenditures. This book brings together the best thinking from both sides of the Atlantic to explore these issues. It employs disciplinary perspectives to explore various ways that value for patients have and can be determined. It concludes with a discussion of changes required in practice, research, and health care systems to maximize the outcomes received from the provision of medical care services from the patients perspective. A major section of the book about clinical practice discusses problems that can reduce the value to patients of medical care. All-in-all, the volume is must read for practitioners, policy makers, and researchers who want to find in one place the state-of-the-art thinking and future directions of valuing medical care from the patients perspective.