September 2014 | Advancing Global Health Policy

New global initiatives aim to help more countries meet ambitious goals for curbing child and maternal deaths by 2015.

Accountable care—a way to align health care payments with patient-focused reform goals—is currently being pursued in the United States, but its principles are also being applied in many other countries. In this article we review experiences ...

Health care systems are under increasing pressure to cope with shifting demographics, the threat of chronic and noncommunicable disease, and rising health care costs. The uptake of innovations to meet these challenges and to advance medicine and health ...

The vast amount of health data generated and stored around the world each day offers significant opportunities for advances such as the real-time tracking of diseases, predicting disease outbreaks, and developing health care that is truly personalized. ...

Transitional care interventions aim to improve care transitions from hospital to home and to reduce hospital readmissions for chronically ill patients. The objective of our study was to examine if these interventions were associated with a reduction of ...

Improving the quality of care for chronic diseases is an important issue for most health care systems in industrialized nations. One widely adopted approach is the Chronic Care Model (CCM), which was first developed in the late 1990s. In this article we ...

Care for people with chronic conditions is an issue of increasing importance in industrialized countries. This article examines three recent efforts at care coordination that have been evaluated but not yet included in systematic reviews. The first is ...

Countries around the globe are investing in health information and communications technologies (ICTs) as critical tools for improving care for chronically ill patients. We profiled four high-income nations with varied health ICT strategies—Australia, ...

The pricing and accessibility of patent-protected drugs in low- and middle-income countries is a contentious issue in the global context. But questions about price have little meaning if a drug is not available for purchase, and the extent to which patent ...

Improving access to quality-assured artemisinin combination therapies (ACTs) is an important component of malaria control in low- and middle-income countries. In 2010 the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria launched the Affordable ...

A few studies have noted the outsize administrative costs of US hospitals, but no research has compared these costs across multiple nations with various types of health care systems. We assembled a team of international health policy experts to conduct ...

Globally, the majority of people with mental health problems do not receive evidence-based interventions that can transform their lives. We describe six mental health policy actions adopted at the World Innovation Summit for Health in 2013. For each ...

From 2011 to 2030, mental health conditions are projected to cost the global economy $16 trillion through lost labor and capital output. The gold standard of psychological interventions, one-on-one therapy, is too costly and too labor-intensive to keep up ...

Provision for end-of-life care around the world is widely variable and often poor, which leads to millions of deaths each year among people without access to essential aspects of care. However, some low- and middle-income countries have improved specific ...

Antimicrobial therapies have played an unquestionably important role in advancing modern medical and surgical care, treating animals, reducing the global burden of communicable disease, and prolonging human life expectancy. These transformational benefits ...

The energy of patients and members of the public worldwide who care about improving health is a huge, but still largely unrecognized and untapped, resource. The aim of patient engagement is to shift the clinical paradigm from determining “what is the ...

The World Health Organization recommends that all countries develop a cancer control program. Qatar is the first country in the Gulf Cooperation Council to develop such a plan, with its National Cancer Strategy 2011–2016. Three years into implementation, ...

The global epidemic of obesity continues to escalate. Obesity accounts for an increasing proportion of the international socioeconomic burden of noncommunicable disease. Online social networking services provide an effective medium through which ...

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) extended eligibility for health insurance for young adults ages 19–25. This extension may have affected how young adults use emergency department (ED) care and other health services. To test the impact of the ACA on how young ...

The emergency department (ED) is now the primary source for hospitalizations in the United States, and admission rates for all causes differ widely between EDs. In this study we used a national sample of ED visits to examine variation in risk-standardized ...

The national effort to promote the adoption and meaningful use of electronic health records (EHRs) is well under way. However, 2014 marks an important transition: For many hospitals, penalties will be assessed in fiscal year 2015 for failing to meet ...

The United States is making substantial investments to accelerate the adoption and use of interoperable electronic health record (EHR) systems. Using data from the 2009–13 Electronic Health Records Survey, we found that EHR adoption continues to grow: In ...

Nearly two-thirds of US office-based physicians work in practices of fewer than seven physicians. It is often assumed that larger practices provide better care, although there is little evidence for or against this assumption. What is the relationship ...

When a family caregiver becomes injured, she learns the difficulties—and costs—of caring for herself and her chronically ill husband at the same time.

With finite resources to advance their missions, regional health foundations should critically evaluate the investments they make. This article reviews the costs and associated benefits of large-scale public opinion polling—specifically, the annual ...