Optimizing Health: Improving the Value of Healthcare Delivery (PDF)

Preface.- Preface.- Preface.- "CLINECS," Strategy and Tactics to Provide Evidence of the Usefulness of Health Care Services from the Patient's Standpoint.- The Systems View of Health Care.- Seeking Justice in Health Care.- Ethics and Evidence-Based Medicine.- Paradoxes of Medical Progress: Abandoned Patients, Physicians, and Nurses.- The Bridge Principles.- A New Instrument to Describe Indicators of Well-Being in Old Patients with Severe Dementia.- Patient Empowerment.- Shared Decision Making in Medicine.- Overdiagnosis and Pseudodisease.- Palliative Medicine Today.- Medical Geography.- Cancer Survival in Europe and the USA.- Patient Safety.- Increasing Safety by Implementing Optimized Team Interaction.- Electronic Medical Records and EbIT.- Cost-Effectiveness Analysis.- Cost-Effectiveness of Lung Volume Reduction Surgery.- The Health Economic Evaluation of Adjuvant Breast Cancer Treatment.- Aims & Value of Screening.- Evidence-Based Health Care Seen From Four Points of View.- Efficacy, Effectiveness and Efficiency of Diagnostic Technology.- Reduced Mammographic Screening May Explain Declines in Breast Carcinoma Among Older Women.- Fading of Reported Effectiveness (FORE) Bias.- Clinical Research and Outcomes Research.- Are the results of randomised trials influenced by preference effects? Findings From a Systematic Review.- Are the results of randomised trials influenced by preference effects? Why current studies often fail to answer this question.- Suggested Changes in Practice, Research, and Systems.- Biographies of Authors.

Franz Porzolt graduated from the University of Marburg School of Medicine and completed a postdoctoral fellowship on a grant from the Deutsche Forschungs-Gemeinschaft at the Princess-Margaret Hospital and Ontario Cancer Institute in Toronto. He received training in Internal Medicine, Hematology, and Medical Oncology at the Medical School of the University of Ulm, where he performed laboratory work and completed his doctoral thesis on "Natural Killer Cells." He established the Clinical Economics Group, which is involved in developing tools for assessing the (non- monetary) values of medical interventions from the patient's point of view. In 2000 he received a second appointment at the Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich and a teaching contract with the Technical University in Munich to integrate Evidence-Based Medicine into the curriculum of medical students. He has worked with the Cochrane Collaboration, and currently has a contract to offer evidence based medicine training in the Alto Adige (Italy).

Robert M. Kaplan is Professor and Chair of the Department of Health Services and Professor of Medicine at UCLA. From 1997-2004, he was Professor and Chair of the Department of Family and Preventive Medicine at the University of California, San Diego. He is currently Chair-Elect of the Behavioral Science Council of the American Thoracic Society. Dr. Kaplan is the Editor- in-Chief of the Annals of Behavioral Medicine and Consulting Editor of four other academic journals. He is currently Co-Chairman of the Behavioral Committee for the NIH Women 's Health Initiative and a member of both the NHLBI Behavioral Medicine Task Force and the Institute of Medicine (IOM) National Academy of Sciences Committee on Health and Behavior. In addition, he is the Chairman of the Cost Effectiveness Committee for the NHLBI National Emphysema Treatment Trial (NETT).