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Dec 21 2012

Pioneering Idea: Your Patient’s Community Health Needs Assessment on the Desktop

Dec 21, 2012, 10:06 AM, Posted by Ted Eytan

Ted Eytan Ted Eytan

In medical school, we were taught an ahead-of-its-time curriculum called "Community Oriented Primary Care." It looks like now we're going to get to be able to practice it.

When I was with the Project HealthDesign (@PrjHealthDesign) team in Nashville earlier this year (see: A visit to Project HealthDesign and the patient voice, spoken through their observations of daily living | Ted Eytan, MD), we participated in an interesting exercise while wearing silly hats. It involved turning our thinking 180 degrees around about the future of health.

 

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May 18 2012

Positioned for Transformation: Expanding the Scope of Health Care

May 18, 2012, 10:58 AM, Posted by Deborah Bae, Jane Isaacs Lowe

In the Stanford Social Innovation Review’s “Realigning Health with Care,” authors Rebecca Onie, Paul Farmer and Heidi Behforouz express their collective belief that—in the United States—we need to expand our understanding of the scope of health care, where it’s delivered and who delivers it. They also make it clear that the time to do so is now if we are going to confront our country’s rising health care costs, primary care physician shortage and expansion of the ranks of those living in poverty or hovering just above it. 

Onie, Farmer and Behforouz also propose that we need to look beyond our shores and borders for models for how to do so, pointing out that “in the developing world, there is no choice but to design health care systems that account for limited financial resources, scarce health care professionals and significant poverty.” 

We couldn’t agree more.

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