Although American medical care is often touted as the best in the world, it’s also plagued with a host of problems, including low quality, high cost, and health disparities. Given these problems, experts contend that the U.S. could learn from other nations that have pioneered successful health innovations.
“Innovations in care are flowering throughout the world, and these are ignored at great cost to Americans, many of whom are ill-served by the health system,” wrote Howard Hiatt, Charles Kenney, and Mark Rosenberg in the November-December 2016 issue of Harvard Magazine. Hiatt, associate chief and co-founder of the division of global health equity, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, served as Dean of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health from 1972-1984.
For an example of innovative health care, the authors cited Lima, Peru, where locals were hired in 1996 to make sure that hundreds of patients with multiple-drug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) took their drugs on a daily basis, for up to two years—and an estimated 80% of patients were cured at a fraction of the cost of treating MDR-TB cases in the U.S.
Recruiting community members to help with home-based care has also worked well in some disadvantaged settings in the U.S., the authors wrote—and such an approach “can work in any setting, and can address the most pressing needs in the U.S. healthcare system: to improve the health and well-being of millions of Americans, at any income level, more effectively and efficiently.”
Read the Harvard Magazine article: Global Health at Home