Bøger i Health Systems Research serien

The measurement of health status and its implications can comprise a number of dimensions: various concepts of health and disease, types of diseases, methodological approaches of measurement, purposes of application and states of implementation.

Held at Valkenburg, Limburg, Netherlands, September 2-4, 1985

Europe faces a challenge: how to apply information and communication technologies to health care.

1st European Conference on Health Economics, Barcelona, 1989

As the focus on pharmaceuticals has broadened from concern for their cost and effectiveness to their real and potential risks and benefits, a critical question has been raised: whose responsibility is it to improve drug safety?

In the past two decades public debate about the risks, benefits, and safety associated with drugs has intensified. Drug risk and drug safety have become an important political issue. Drug surveillance activities have gained recognition, and reporting systems to identify drug safety problems have been strengthened.

Over the past decades, health care delivery - once characterized by clearly defined relationships between medical professionals, regulators, and industr- has become much more complex. They bring into the discussion the need for cost containment and the changing perceptions of the public with regard to the risks and benefits of health care outcomes.

A health policy for the future is the topic of discussion in this book. Separate sections of the book treat the primary health care system in relation to public involvement, family medicine, epidemiology, health economics, and institutional requirements.

These questions, and those related to the intriguing search for better quality of life, are addressed in this book by experts from the fields of medicine, epidemiology, economics, sociology and the pharmaceutical industry.

In the early stages of planning the Third International Conference in System Science in Health Care, the steering committee members, most of whom had participated in the first conference in Paris (1976) and the second in Montreal (1980), made some basic decisions about organization of subject matter. The earlier meetings had been very successful in bringing together specialists from the health professions and the traditional sciences. In addition to physicians and nurses, these were representatives of the disciplines of the behavioral sciences, system theory, economics, engineering, and the emergency fields of management science and informatics -all concerned with the development of health resources in a broad system context. The reported research and experience of the many disciplines represented had dealt with one or more of three concerns: 1) a major health problem, such as cardiovascular disease, or an important popUlation at risk, such as the elderly or children or workers; 2) some generic aspect of organization and decision making, including trial and evaluation ofinnovative health strategies; and 3) the methodology of research and analysis in system of health service. The challenge to the conference organizers lay in the eliciting and arranging of experiences in such a way that the health services could be seen as purposeful,living, evolving systems.