Can healthcare without charge and no fundraising exist? Free healthcare is desirable by every patient provided there is no compromise in quality. To be precise, if all the five principles of healthcare can be assured, it is a no-brainer that any patient would prefer to be treated free of cost. But is this possible? How can…
Is treating the disease the same as treating the patient? Healthcare of the body, mind and spirit has several components. Each component is driven by the primal purpose of the science and art of medicine defined by what Hippocrates said over 2,000 years ago. A popular model of doctor-patient relationship is one where the patient…
How long do I have to wait to see a doctor? Access delayed is access denied. A patient’s access to healthcare is a thorny issue that plagues most healthcare systems. The goals of a healthcare system are to keep healthy patients healthy and to enable sick patients to become healthy. Both these goals are somewhat lofty. The first…
Is compassion a dirty word in a world of profit maximizing entrepreneurship? Compassion is a time consuming heart-to-heart contact between the healthcare professional and the patient. This seems antithetical to a fundamental goal of most healthcare institutions – profit maximization. Doctors are often driven to bring revenues to meet expenses. Even the so called non-profit institutions…
Does the Healthcare System Use State-of-the-Art technology, knowledge, Research, and Clinical Best Practices in Managing Individual and Population Health? There are four variables that characterize state-of-the-art healthcare: technology, knowledge, research and clinical best practices. These variables represent a combination of physical and human capital. Together they provide the tools required to have a significant positive impact on…
Why is an Ounce of Prevention Better than a Pound of Cure? One of the first steps in understanding the significance of prevention is to distinguish between disease prevention and early disease detection. Each is a separate variable and data on expenditures for prevention should not aggregate these two expenditures. Instead we need separate data on…
Simple Mathematics Proposed in this Blog This blog proposes a mathematical basis for measuring a country’s proximity to a goal of achieving an ideal healthcare system. For this purpose, this blog proposes a scoring system called the 6P score. In addition, it proposes a multivariate regression that will establish the relative importance of each of the…
What Animals Have Taught Us: Six principles of an ideal healthcare system The previous post describes six striking principles of healthcare used in the world of animals in the wild. Recall that animals far outnumber the human population. They have survived over several millennia with many living healthy lives. The principles are simple but it remains…
