2. Social Values in Medical Care
• Social Value serves as an umbrella term for these broader
effects, and organizations which make a conscious effort to
ensure that these effects are positive can be seen as adding
social value by contributing to the long-term wellbeing and
resilience of individuals, communities and society in general.
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3. aspects to social values
• It is relate to groups of people and the relationships between
them.
• This is a distinction between ends and means.
• In health and social care, social value judgments are nearly
always entwined in the ends sought, such as population health
gain and the elimination of avoidable inequalities of health
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4. • Health care and social care may indeed be means to the end of
better and fairer health and fuller lives but one needs to ask if
their effectiveness in achieving those ends (and probably others
too) is all that matters.
• Being treated with kindness and dignity is a social value
judgement about the processes of health and social care.
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5. • Social values have ethical status
• Values are moral principles and ought to be followed, if they
can be.
• Not all values can be fully respected or followed, simply
because they are very demanding.
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6. Mixing values
• Decisions about the financing of health care can be resolved
only by combining principles
• social value judgment is also nearly always needed too!
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7. Improving Efficiency and Value in
Health Care
• Our health care system is characterized by high and rising
healthcare costs as well as gaps in quality, safety, equity, and
access.
• Consumers also seek guidance about how to maximize the
value of their own health care dollar, particularly since some
payer innovations have increased consumers’ financial
exposure.
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8. • if a hospital attempts to implement a program that is too
difficult for its ability level, it will invariably incur a higher level
of inefficiency and waste.
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9. • campaigns to monitor and track equipment failures
and facility failures may be a fruitful next step for
major improvements in safety and efficiency of
systems in hospitals.
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10. • Is there a method whereby the level of
inefficiency at hospitals can be quantified?
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11. • even among high quality hospitals with low patient
safety rates, there was still much inefficiency due
principally to unused resources such as idle
personnel.
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12. • people were responding to the financial incentive to
choose high quality hospitals for medical admissions
• This result suggests that there may be differential
success and therefore “efficiencies” by appropriate
use of financial incentives for patients
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13. • For example, financial incentives for surgery may
need to be large enough so that patients are willing
to travel longer distances to a high-quality hospital,
while this may not be necessary for medical
hospitalizations.
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14. • efficient” design of benefits and financial incentives
for patients will need to consider other factors such
as the vital role that physicians play in referring
patients to surgeons,
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15. • This theme issue provides an overview of some
recent and innovative research focusing on efforts to
understand, quantify and improve efficiency and
value in health care.
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16. • any design of efficiency improvements and value-
based benefits must involve an integrated approach
over time, across markets, and throughout the
organization from top to bottom
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