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The exploding cost of health care in the United States is a source of widespread alarm. Similarly, the upward spiral of college tuition fees is cause for serious concern. In this concise and illuminating book, well-known economist William J. Baumol explores the causes of these seemingly intractable problems and offers a surprisingly simple explanation. Baumol identifies the \"cost disease\" as a major source of rapidly rising costs in service sectors of the economy. Once we understand that disease, he explains, effective responses become apparent.Baumol presents his analysis with characteristic clarity, tracing the fast-rising prices of health care and education in the U.S. and other major industrial nations, then examining the underlying causes of the phenomenon, which have to do with the nature of providing labor-intensive services. The news is good, Baumol reassures, because the nature of the disease is such that society will be able to afford the rising costs.

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.

Financial Management for Health-System Pharmacists, 2nd edition, serves as a guidebook to support the management of enterprise pharmacy finance across business and care continuums. The 2nd edition engages the reader with a mix of chapters, some new to this edition, along with a trove of new health-system pharmacy financial business cases. As leaders look to transform their organizations, the principles and practices provided give the reader the knowledge and guidance to craft a new path forward as they look to improve the provision of pharmacy and patient-care services.

Along with being the biggest sector of the U.S. economy, healthcare is also the most dysfunctional. This book presents a compelling vision of how healthcare can work better and how we can get there with the current resources. Providing a comprehensive, positive, and intriguing vision of the future, this book tells healthcare providers how they can reposition their organizations to thrive regardless of what the government does in regards to policy. It also outlines how employers can save money by changing the way they provide healthcare to their employees.

This is the definitive work on Medicare's prospective payment system (PPS), which had its origins in the 1972 Social Security Amendments, was first applied to hospitals in 1983, and came to fruition with the Balanced Budget Act of 1997. Here, Rick Mayes and Robert A. Berenson, M.D., explain how Medicare's innovative payment system triggered shifts in power away from the providers (hospitals and doctors) to the payers (government insurers and employers) and how providers have responded to encroachments on their professional and financial autonomy. They conclude with a discussion of the problems with the Medicare Modernization Act of 2003 and offer prescriptions for how policy makers can use Medicare payment policy to drive improvements in the U.S. health care system. Mayes and Berenson draw from interviews with more than sixty-five major policy makers—including former Treasury secretary Robert Rubin, U.S. Representatives Pete Stark and Henry Waxman, former White House chief of staff Leon Panetta, and former administrators of the Health Care Financing Administration Gail Wilensky, Bruce Vladeck, Nancy-Ann DeParle, and Tom Scully—to explore how this payment system worked and its significant effects on the U.S. medical landscape in the past twenty years. They argue that, although managed care was an important agent of change in the 1990s, the private sector has not been the major health care innovator in the United States; rather, Medicare's transition to PPS both initiated and repeatedly intensified the economic restructuring of the U.S. health care system.

The purpose of economic evaluation is to inform decisions intended to improve healthcare. The new edition of Methods for the Economic Evaluation of Health Care Programmes equips the reader with the essential hands-on experience to undertake evaluations, providing a 'tool kit' based on the authors own experience of undertaking economic evaluations.

A growing number of archaeologists are applying Geographic Information Science (GIS) technologies to their research problems and questions. Advances in GIS and its use across disciplines allows for collaboration and enables archaeologists to ask ever more sophisticated questions and develop increasingly elaborate models on numerous aspects of past human behavior. Least cost analysis (LCA) is one such avenue of inquiry. While least cost studies are not new to the social sciences in general, LCA is relatively new to archaeology; until now, there has been no systematic exploration of its use within the field. This edited volume presents a series of case studies illustrating the intersection of archaeology and LCA modeling at the practical, methodological, and theoretical levels. Designed to be a guidebook for archaeologists interested in using LCA in their own research, it presents a wide cross-section of practical examples for both novices and experts. The contributors to the volume showcase the richness and diversity of LCA’s application to archaeological questions, demonstrate that even simple applications can be used to explore sophisticated research questions, and highlight the challenges that come with injecting geospatial technologies into the archaeological research process.  

Why do companies exert high effort to reduce the costs of products that are production? Because they can! Because unnecessary product costs were not removed during product development. C-O-S-T, short for Cost Optimization System and Technique, details how a company's product development teams, their supporting functions, and company leaders can optimize product costs before production starts and thereby maximize lifecycle profits. Since product development teams determine product costs imparted to new products, much of the book details how these teams optimize product costs. The book also includes ways company leaders can create and sustain company-wide engagement in optimizing product costs and keeping the resulting increased profit margins. The reader is entertained while observing a three-day workshop where executives of a fictitious company, Defender Products, Inc. are being taught the C-O-S-T system by its developers. The story flows like a business workshop with slides, dialog, and break-out sessions. The content will benefit all companies that design, develop and manufacture products.

\"The field's bestselling reference, updated with the latest tools, data, and techniques Cost-Effectiveness Analysis in Health is a practical introduction to the tools, methods, and procedures used worldwide to perform cost-effective research. Covering every aspect of a complete cost-effectiveness analysis, this book shows you how to find which data you need, where to find it, how to analyze it, and how to prepare a high-quality report for publication. Designed for the classroom or the individual learner, the material is presented in simple and accessible language for those who lack a biostatistics or epidemiology background, and each chapter includes real-world examples and \"tips and tricks\" that highlight key information. Exercises throughout allow you to test your understanding with practical application, and the companion website features downloadable data sets for students, as well as lecture slides and a test bank for instructors. This new third edition contains new discussion on meta-analysis and advanced modeling techniques, a long worked example using visual modeling software TreeAge Pro, and updated recommendations from the U.S. Public Health Service's Panel on Cost-Effectiveness in Health and Medicine. Cost-effectiveness analysis is used to evaluate medical interventions worldwide, in both developed and developing countries. This book provides process-specific instruction in a concise, structured format to give you a robust working knowledge of common methods and techniques. Develop a thoroughly fleshed-out research project Work accurately with costs, probabilities, and models Calculate life expectancy and quality-adjusted life years Prepare your study and your data for publication Comprehensive analysis skills are essential for students seeking careers in public health, medicine, biomedical research, health economics, health policy, and more. Cost-Effectiveness Analysis in Health walks you through the process from a real-world perspective to help you build a skillset that's immediately applicable in the field\"--Provided by publisher