How Does the Benefit Value of Medicare Compare to the Benefit Value of Typical Large Employer Plans?: A 2012 Update

Compares the value of benefits for those age 65 and older under Medicare and under two large employer plans typical of those for which premium support could be offered under reform proposals. Examines share of costs paid by the plan and by individuals

Health Care Benefits -- Creating the Optimal Design

Explores the role of benefit design and market innovations such as consumer-driven health plans and value-based insurance design to maximize beneficial coverage and offer incentives for better health and efficiency. Outlines implications for reform

Written information about individual medicines for consumers.

Medicines are the most common intervention in most health services. As with all treatments, those taking medicines need sufficient information: to enable them to take and use the medicines effectively, to understand the potential harms and benefits, and to allow them to make an informed decision about taking them. Written medicines information, such as a leaflet or provided via the Internet, is an intervention that may meet these purposes

Providing Outpatient Prescription Drugs through Medicare: Can We Afford To? Can We Afford Not To?

The continuing debate over the issue of Medicare coverage for outpatient prescription drugs gave rise to this background paper, which discussed several key questions: Whose responsibility is it to provide coverage? Who should be covered? What should be covered? Who should pay for prescription drug coverage? How should costs be controlled? In addition, the paper explored options for structuring a Medicare outpatient prescription drug benefit. It also contained a glossary

Listening to Current Practice: Patient Involvement in the Pharmaceutical Packaging Design Process

Multiple functional challenges in the use of pharmaceutical packaging reveal a great need of packaging to be designed inclusively. This study investigates patient involvement in the pharmaceutical packaging design process by analysing interview data from representatives of the pharmaceutical and packaging industry. Four main themes related to patient involvement were uncovered: patient expertise levels, patient involvement modes, factors encouraging patient involvement, and factors discouraging patient involvement. Passive patient involvement modes were found to be dominant due to regulations and a traditional perspective regarding physical testing. However, active patient involvement modes were identified, motivated by empathy and understanding of the lives of patients. The pharmaceutical packaging design process is complex and involves multiple stakeholders. The research findings can inspire more industry practitioners and policymakers to design pharmaceutical packaging that is inclusive and with consideration of a broader spectrum of patients’ needs

The Health Care Financing Maze for Working-Age People with Disabilities

Much of the research on health care financing for people with disabilities has focused on the Medicaid and Medicare programs. The findings of this research often highlight the inadequacies of those programs in providing appropriate services to address the special needs of people with disabilities. A focus on these large programs, however, obscures the role of other public and private insurers, as well as the role of programs that provide many additional services to this population – all of which add complexity to the system. The purpose of this paper is to describe the health care financing system as a whole, including the large public programs, other public and private insurers, and the many other programs that provide additional services. The description of the system highlights structural problems that need to be addressed in order to substantially improve the delivery of health and related services to people with disabilities. In the next section, we describe each source of health care financing for working-age people with disabilities and highlight its implications for service delivery and quality of life. In the concluding section, we describe the key structural shortcomings of the current financing system, assess the extent to which current reform efforts are addressing these shortcomings, and discuss the implications for broader efforts to reform health care financing system

Conveying meaning through design in a safety critical medical system

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel UniversityMedication errors account for a significant number of medical errors. Giving medications to patients is an activity that carries a high risk of error. In an effort to improve patient safety in this area several approaches have been employed. Many of these have taken a systems approach in that they consider how organisational factors such as medicines management, staffing levels, ward layout, shift patterns and staff training have contributed to the errors. None of these studies describe errors in detailed form at task level. This Thesis addresses the gap in knowledge by presenting a systematic analysis of the component tasks of hospital drug administration where none exists and goes on to describe novel design artefacts that assist the identification of drugs. The thesis highlights how hierarchical task analysis, a human factors technique, can be applied to the hospital drug administration task. Task analysis techniques have been used in many high-risk domains in industry as a means of analysing human activity in complex systems but remains an underused technique in health care. Used with the Systematic Human Error Reduction and Prediction Approach (SHERPA), hierarchical task analysis provides an effective way of predicting where errors in the drug administration task are likely to occur. SHERPA uses a taxonomy of human error modes to highlight types of error and makes suggestions to reduce these errors. Medication errors take many forms however it was decided to focus on the immediate interaction between the nurse and the patient. The measures considered to potentially have a significant influence were adding conspicuous labelling to medication packages. These were enhanced by icons intended to represent categories of drugs. Constructing a three dimensional representation of the icon design was considered to provide nurses with an additional channel of information. Technological solutions were proposed and a patient identity bracelet that uses a programmable chip to link the patient to their prescribed medication was viewed as having a huge potential to simplify the checking aspect of administering medications in which the nurse compares a medication order which is often badly written with available drug stock. The device prevents nurses giving medications to the wrong patient. It also prevents them administering an overdose.Anthony Anson medical fun

Toward a High Performance Health System for the United States

Describes the features of the U.S. healthcare system and measures ten areas of performance, including access to appropriate care, quality care from the patient's perspective, affordability, and capacity for improvement. Provides recommendations

The Value Driven Pharmacist: Basics of Access, Cost, and Quality 2nd Edition

https://digitalcommons.butler.edu/butlerbooks/1017/thumbnail.jp

Designing packaging to support the safe use of medicines at home

The design of pharmaceutical products, packaging, information and related materials is a major source of human error. These errors may be stressful, harmful or even fatal. Given the scale of the problems and the global use of medication, design solutions are urgently needed. This paper in Applied Ergonomics demonstrated how such improvements can be made, drawing on research that investigated how the design of methotrexate packaging can influence patient safety. The project, undertaken in light of a number of serious incidents in the UK resulting from accidental overdoses of methotrexate, aimed to collect evidence to provide a basis for the development of new concepts for revised designs by the pharmaceutical industry. Buckle et al. found that patients using methotrexate experience a number of difficulties in using their medicine’s packaging and, as a result, resourcefully adopt a variety of ‘coping strategies’ which may increase the risk of dosing errors. By investigating both the practices of methotrexate users, and the design of the system that supports methotrexate use, additional problems were observed across the healthcare system, meaning that the function of medicines packaging in ensuring safety may be even more critical than first suspected. Buckle contributed to this paper through the derivation of a suitable human-factors approach to studying fatalities, errors and ‘near misses’ associated with the use of packaging for medications. The human factors (human behaviour) associated with these and the need to consider the whole system were essential elements provided by Buckle in the research. As a result of the research project, the National Patient Safety Agency responded with a UK-wide programme of work to improve safety for patients, and continues to work with the pharmaceutical industry to develop more user-friendly packaging and labelling