Medical professionals include doctors, nurses, hospice workers, emergency medical technicians, and other trained caregivers. RAND research has analyzed retention and job satisfaction among medical professionals, examined civilian and military health care education and training, and explored the impact of the many policies that affect physicians' and nurses' duties and performance.
The Helping Families Raise Healthy Children initiative addressed depression among parents of children with early childhood developmental delays, aligning the early intervention and behavioral health systems with a focus on relationship-based care.
RAND Health research supports four strategies to restrain health care spending growth and maintain quality: foster efficient and accountable providers, engage and empower consumers, promote population health, and facilitate high-value innovation.
Providers can dramatically improve American health care by focusing on value instead of volume, eliminating wasteful and inappropriate care, applying the best available evidence to their practices, and enhancing patient safety.
Health information technology has not achieved its full potential, but its benefits should grow over time. Because health care is largely regulated at the state level, the states can play a valuable role as laboratories for innovative policies.
Analyses indicated that although physicians uniformly felt responsible for assessing and promoting adherence to prescriptions, only a minority of them asked detailed questions about adherence.
Vaccine-preventable diseases take a heavy toll on U.S. adults despite the widespread availability of vaccines. Office-based providers can do more to promote adult vaccinations but need clearer guidance and a better business case to offer them.
The use of dedicated anesthesia providers for routine gastroenterology (GI) procedures is seen as medically justifiable only for high-risk patients. Eliminating these services for low-risk patients could generate $1.1 billion in savings per year.
Offers recommendations for improving the education and training of California's early childhood workforce.
Since Massachusetts enacted health reform legislation in 2006, health care employment in the state has grown more rapidly than in the rest of the United States, primarily in administrative positions.
The most comprehensive analysis of the risk of malpractice claims by physician specialty in more than two decades finds that U.S. physicians have a greater than 75% career-long risk of facing litigation. In some specialties, doctors can be virtually certain of a lawsuit over the course of their careers. However, the vast majority of those claims will not result in payment to a plaintiff.
Two goals of the joint medical training and education campus at Ft. Sam Houston are to become a high-performing learning organization and an accredited, degree-granting institution. A research and evaluation capability would help it meet these goals.
Promoting Flu Vaccination Among Health Care Personnel
The Military Health System faces a range of challenges, and effective leadership is key to meeting them. Approaches used by other organizations could guide improvements in how military health care leaders are selected, developed, and incentivized.
Reports the results of a longitudinal study of youth from military families and their caregivers concerning their emotional well-being and how well they are coping with servicemembers' extended deployments.
Less than half of acute care visits in the United States involve a patient's personal physician. Emergency physicians, who comprise only 4 percent of doctors, handle 28 percent of all acute care encounters and nearly all after-hours and weekend care.
Analysis of labor market trends suggests that the United States is experiencing a shortage of anesthesiology providers.
Summarizes results of RAND's evaluation of the progress and impact of Arkansas' antismoking and health programs established with its share of tobacco settlement funds.
To maintain relevant medical skills, some military medical personnel stationed at military treatment facilities could be stationed in civilian emergency rooms and trauma centers, where cases more closely resemble those found during deployment.
Air Force, Army, and Navy training programs for enlisted medical personnel are being consolidated to increase interoperability. A RAND methodology defines standards of practice across services and evaluates options for obtaining qualified personnel.
This fact sheet summarizes recommendations for health care workers, consumers, and the scientific community to prepare the health care system for genomic medicine for common chronic diseases.
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