The Healthcare Imperative: Lowering Costs and Improving Outcomes

Excerpt

To explore the issues and opportunities central to lowering health-care expenditures in the United States, the IOM Roundtable on Value & Science-Driven Health Care convened the four-part series The Healthcare Imperative: Lowering Costs and Improving Outcomes in May, July, September, and December of 2009 at the National Academies in Washington, DC. These meetings were part of the Roundtable’s Learning Health System series. The series aimed to gather stakeholders in a trusted venue to engage the issues and concerns needed to facilitate the development of a health-care system that not only delivers best practices and adds value with each clinical encounter, but adds seamlessly to the knowledge base for health improvement. Motivated by the proposition noted above of reducing per capita health spending in the country by 10 percent within 10 years without compromising health status, quality of care, or innovation, the meeting objectives included: characterizing and discussing the major causes of excess healthcare spending, waste, and inefficiency in the United States; considering the strategies that might reduce per capita health spending in the United States while improving health outcomes; and exploring policy options relevant to those strategies.