Dr. David Zitner and AIMS president Brian Lee Crowley demonstrate that politicians and senior health officials simply don’t know where or why medicare is failing because they still lack the proper tools to evaluate the quality or timeliness of the care Canadians receive.
Dr. David Zitner, AIMS Fellow in Health Care Policy, and Brian Lee Crowley, AIMS President, have made a submission to the Commission on the Future of Health Care chaired by the Honourable Roy Romanow. The submission outlines the conflict of interest arising from government acting as health services insurer, as health care provider and as evaluator of health care delivery and suggests that these functions need to be separated. The authors also recommend that regulators require health organisations to collect and publicise valid and reliable information linking health outcomes to their activities, and also provide reliable information about access to care. They close with a discussion of the need to assess proposals to change health care by tying them to a testable estimate of how the new structures and processes will influence access to care or patient and/or population health.
David Zitner and Brian Lee Crowley analyse some recent proposals to protect the privacy of individual medical records, and find that they would greatly increase the cost and reduce the efficacy of medical research while conferring little benefit in terms of additional privacy. They recommend a less draconian solution, one consistent with the community's need to maximise its knowledge about its own health and the effectiveness of various medical procedures. Click here to read "Don't Close the Shutters", originally published in The Medical Post on 11 January 2000.