Evolution
Healthcare is consistently cited in political polls and in surveys as a chief concern for consumers, administrators, employers and clinicians alike.
The formal establishment of quality improvement organizations in 2002 and rise of independent organizations such as The National Committee for Quality Assurance, The Leapfrog Group and Bridges to Excellence - all of which are dedicated to promoting and monitoring healthcare quality - illustrate intense concern over inefficiency, safety, and customer service in healthcare.
In addition, skyrocketing costs, increases in chronic diseases, geographic dispersion of families, growing provider shortages, troubling ethnic disparities in care, better survival rates among patients fighting serious diseases, an aging U.S. population and longer lifespan are all factors pointing to a need for better ways of delivering healthcare.
Consumer demand for better service and quality in healthcare is the latest source of pressure to improve the healthcare system. Experts speculate that, having acclimated to greater speed, efficiency and cost transparency - as well as vastly improved access to information about products and services - in other industries, consumers are calling for the same responsiveness from the healthcare system. Direct-to-consumer advertising is a demonstrated contributor to the rise in consumer demand, as is the mass availability of inexpensive technology and ubiquity of the Internet, cell phones and PDAs. Connected health experts such as Joseph C. Kvedar, M.D., believe that consumer engagement in healthcare is on its way to becoming a major force for change.
In summary, connected health has arisen from: 1) a desire on the part of individual physicians and healthcare organizations to provide better access, quality and efficiency of care 2) dynamics of the healthcare economy (such as rising costs and changing demographics) 3) consumerism in health care and a drive towards patient centric healthcare. Together, these factors are providing impetus for connected healthcare in the United States and many other industrialised nations and forcing innovation both from within and outside the system.
Read more about this topic: Connected Health
Famous quotes containing the word evolution:
“Historians will have to face the fact that natural selection determined the evolution of cultures in the same manner as it did that of species.”
—Konrad Lorenz (1903–1989)
“The evolution of a highly destined society must be moral; it must run in the grooves of the celestial wheels.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“What we think of as our sensitivity is only the higher evolution of terror in a poor dumb beast. We suffer for nothing. Our own death wish is our only real tragedy.”
—Mario Puzo (b. 1920)