From the Back Cover

Are our patients getting what they want for their health care money?

Should we change anything to give our patients more of what they want?

Do we even know what they want?

When service delivery, patient expectations, and the bottom line are in conflict, quality generally suffers. But such conflict can be minimized, say the editors of Optimizing Health.

Answering elusive questions on how quality emerges in medical care, Franz Porzsolt and Robert Kaplan synthesize findings from closely interrelated aspects of clinical practice, clinical epidemiology, health economics, psychology, and ethics. The resulting systems perspective of this timely book merges thinking from clinical medicine and economics to form the hybrid term "CLINECS". The book challenges readers to rethink the standard criteria for assessing benefit to patients, and shows how evidence-based medicine can be incorporated into actual public health settings, clarifying key medical goals regarding patient autonomy. An international panel of experts offers practical, workable guidelines for:

-Understanding the value of services from the patient’s point of view

-Involving patients in medical decision-making

-Avoiding overdiagnosis and overly aggressive treatment

-Reconciling outcomes research and clinical research

-Measuring patient quality of life―even for those who are cognitively impaired

-Improving efficacy and effectiveness throughout the system

Optimizing Health outlines an agenda of critical importance to health care professionals, researchers, and policymakers. This vision also makes it a bedrock graduate-level text for tomorrow’s clinicians and administrators. This is material that will be studied, discussed, debated, but most of all, benefited from.

About the Author

Franz Porzolt graduated from the University of Marburg School of Medicine and completed a postdoctoral fellowship on a grant from the Deutsche Forschungs-Gemeinschaft at the Princess-Margaret Hospital and Ontario Cancer Institute in Toronto. He received training in Internal Medicine, Hematology, and Medical Oncology at the Medical School of the University of Ulm, where he performed laboratory work and completed his doctoral thesis on "Natural Killer Cells." He established the Clinical Economics Group, which is involved in developing tools for assessing the (non- monetary) values of medical interventions from the patient's point of view. In 2000 he received a second appointment at the Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich and a teaching contract with the Technical University in Munich to integrate Evidence-Based Medicine into the curriculum of medical students. He has worked with the Cochrane Collaboration, and currently has a contract to offer evidence based medicine training in the Alto Adige (Italy).

Robert M. Kaplan is Professor and Chair of the Department of Health Services and Professor of Medicine at UCLA. From 1997-2004, he was Professor and Chair of the Department of Family and Preventive Medicine at the University of California, San Diego. He is currently Chair-Elect of the Behavioral Science Council of the American Thoracic Society. Dr. Kaplan is the Editor- in-Chief of the Annals of Behavioral Medicine and Consulting Editor of four other academic journals. He is currently Co-Chairman of the Behavioral Committee for the NIH Women 's Health Initiative and a member of both the NHLBI Behavioral Medicine Task Force and the Institute of Medicine (IOM) National Academy of Sciences Committee on Health and Behavior. In addition, he is the Chairman of the Cost Effectiveness Committee for the NHLBI National Emphysema Treatment Trial (NETT).