WASHINGTON, DC—Today, October 31, the Center for American Progress and the Institute on Medicine as a Profession released a new book, titled “The Health Care Delivery System: A Blueprint for Reform.”
Concern about the state of the American health care system has reached a slow boil. Health care consistently ranks among the top three issues that the American public wants policymakers to address, and it is increasingly intertwined with growing worries about economic insecurity. High costs, gap-ridden coverage, and sporadic quality are the health care problems that most concern Americans. Yet most of the policy discussion is focused on the issue of coverage.
To ensure that the other problems are not forgotten and that delivery system reform is central to any plan, the Center for American Progress and the Institute on Medicine as a Profession partnered to develop the book, The Health Care Delivery System: A Blueprint for Reform. In the health policy arena there is a dearth of specific policy recommendations to improve the delivery system. Yet these ideas are often disconnected from the current system, with no policy pathway, backed by leadership and organization, to get from here to there.
This book offers recommendations and pathways to systematically promote quality, efficiency, patient-centeredness, and other salient characteristics of a high-performing health system. The blueprint it lays out is a vision of how different parts of the system should be structured and how they should function. Even more specifically, it proposes policies that the next administration and Congress could enact over the next five years to improve our health system. Different areas of focus in the book include: infrastructure, organization, quality, payment reform, patient activation, and population health.
Overview and Recommendations (pdf)
Full book (pdf)