Medicine and Health Sciences Commons^™

Law, Technology And Patient Safety, Kathryn Zeiler, Gregory Hardy

Faculty Scholarship

Medical error is the third leading cause of death in the United States, In an effort to increase patient safety, various regulatory agencies require reporting of adverse events, but reported counts tend to be inaccurate. In 2005, in an effort to reduce adverse event rates, Congress proposed a list of “never events,” adverse events, such as wrong-site surgery, that should never occur in hospitals, and authorized CMS to refuse payment for care required following such events. CMS has since pushed for further regulation, “such as putting more payment at risk, increasing transparency, increasing frequency of quality data reviews, and stepping …

Delinking Investment In Antibiotic Research And Development From Sales Revenues: The Challenges Of Transforming A Promising Idea Into Reality, Kevin Outterson, Unni Gopinathan, Charles Clift, Anthony So, Chantal Morel, John-Arne Røttingen

Faculty Scholarship

1. The current business model for antibiotics is plagued by market failures and perverse incentives that both work against conservation efforts and provide insufficient rewards to drive the development of much-needed new treatments for resistant infection.

2. Many new incentive mechanisms have been proposed to realign incentives and support innovation and conservation over the long term. The most promising of these are based on the idea of delinking rewards from sales volume of the antibiotic — the notion of “delinkage.”

3. Some critical design issues for delinkage remain, such as how to secure access to badly needed new products when …

Criminal Laws On Sex Work And Hiv Transmission: Mapping The Laws, Considering The Consequence, Aziza Ahmed, Sienna Baskin, Anna Forbes

Faculty Scholarship

Lawmakers historically justify the mobilization of criminal laws on prostitution and HIV as a means of controlling the spread of disease. Over time, however, public health research has conclusively demonstrated that criminal laws on prostitution and HIV significantly impede the ability of sex workers to access services and to live without the stigma and blame associated with being a transmitter of HIV. In turn, mainstream public health approaches to sex work and HIV emphasize decriminalization as a way to improve the lives of sex workers in need of care, treatment, and services. Our current legal system, which criminalizes both prostitution …

Outcomes Assessment In Health Care Reform: Promise And Limitations, Wendy K. Mariner

Faculty Scholarship

If the fundamental goals of the health care reform effort are to ensure universal access to an acceptable quality of health care at an affordable cost, then the threshold question for reform is: What health care services should be provided in an efficient, equitable system?

Answering this question requires weighing a complex mix of medical and social policy factors, a process not attempted in this article. But the starting point for that process should be determining what health care services “work” and what they cost. Outcomes assessment holds considerable promise in finding answers to these subsidiary questions, because it is …