Perspectives
by Laura DeStefano | Jun 27, 2012 | Discussion Paper, Perspectives
Introduction Harvey V. Fineberg, MD, PhD President, Institute of Medicine In a discussion paper published in January 2012, a group of us at the Institute of Medicine (IOM) put forward some ideas about the “deadly sins” of public health. At the end, I suggested six...
by Laura DeStefano | Jun 19, 2012 | Discussion Paper, Perspectives
Introduction This paper describes 10 attributes of health literate health care organizations, that is, health care organizations that make it easier for people to navigate, understand, and use information and services to take care of their health. Having health...
by Laura DeStefano | Jun 15, 2012 | Commentary, Perspectives
For decades, using electronic health records (EHRs) and exchanging health information has been viewed as essential for modernizing health care and improving patient care. The 2009 Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act provided...
by Laura DeStefano | Jun 5, 2012 | Discussion Paper, Perspectives
As leaders of health care organizations, we are acutely aware of the pressures that rising health care costs place on individuals, employers, and the government, as we are of unacceptable shortfalls in the quality and efficiency of care. But we have also learned,...
by Laura DeStefano | Jun 1, 2012 | Commentary, Perspectives
In the next 10 years, data and the ability to analyze them will do for doctors’ minds what X-ray and medical imaging have done for their vision. How? By turning data into actionable information. Take, for instance, IBM’s intelligent supercomputer, Watson. Watson can...
by Laura DeStefano | May 18, 2012 | Commentary, Perspectives
The Institute of Medicine’s (IOM’s) release of the reports To Err is Human and Crossing the Quality Chasm in 1999 and 2001, respectively, were markers of a tipping point in U.S. health care. Prior to that time, “quality” in health care had largely been defined by...
by Laura DeStefano | May 18, 2012 | Discussion Paper, Perspectives
In Canada, as elsewhere, the translation of health research outcomes to development of products and services for health care and final implementation in patients does not progress as rapidly, efficiently, or successfully as it should. In order to address this problem,...
by Laura DeStefano | May 18, 2012 | Discussion Paper, Perspectives
Introduction Traditional randomised clinical trials are very expensive and time-consuming and often have poor external validity (Ware and Hamel, 2011). The challenge for modern medicine is to find ways of producing good-quality evidence with good external validity and...
by Laura DeStefano | May 18, 2012 | Discussion Paper, Perspectives
The arrangements for the regulation and governance of health research in the United Kingdom (UK) have evolved, piecemeal, over the past 30 years, and much is now enshrined in UK and European Union (EU) legislation. Each individual measure was introduced with the best...
by Laura DeStefano | May 11, 2012 | Discussion Paper, Perspectives
Introduction Clinical trials in the United States have a rich history of involving academic, industry, and government institutions (e.g. the National Institutes of Health [NIH]) to address important medical questions. Nonetheless, over time, clinical trials in the...
