In This Issue
Engineering and the Health Care Delivery System
March 1, 2008 Volume 38 Issue 1
Volume 38, Number 1, Spring 2008. There are abundant reasons for the problems in health care delivery. Engineers may not be able to solve all of them, but the benefits of working toward solutions can be tremendous, and the challenges they present are enormously intellectually stimulating.
Articles In This Issue
  • Saturday, March 1, 2008
    AuthorW. Dale Compton, Proctor P. Reid

    Editor’s Note

    The suggestion that engineers join in the struggle to improve the health care system almost always elicits surprise, even though engineers have been actively involved in bioengineering and biomaterials engineering for years. In addition, publications on using ...

  • Saturday, March 1, 2008
    AuthorPaul F. Levy

    Systemic changes require cooperation between those who deliver care and administrators committed to the public disclosure of outcomes.

    Academic medical centers, the crown jewels of the medical system, have a tripartite mission. First, of course, as hospitals, they are intimately involved in ...

  • Saturday, March 1, 2008
    AuthorJerome H. Grossman

    Innovative, “disruptive” changes in the way health care is organized, paid for, and delivered may lead to a transformation of the overall health care system.

    Seven years after the publication of two seminal reports by the Institute of Medicine, To Err Is Human (IOM, 2000) and ...

  • Saturday, March 1, 2008
    AuthorWilliam B. Rouse

    Management of complex adaptive systems requires leadership rather than power, incentives and inhibitions rather than command and control.

    For several years, the National Academies has been engaged in a systemic study of the quality and cost of health care in the United States (IOM, 2000, 2001; ...

  • Saturday, March 1, 2008
    AuthorW. Mark Saltzman

    Engineering innovation will continue to improve the quality of life and increase life expectancy.

    In the twentieth century, overall life expectancy increased by 30 years (Figure 1), and young people today can expect to live longer, healthier, more active lives than their great-grandparents, ...