Health and medicine/Health care
On October 26th a short symposium was held by Science's office in Cambridge UK, on the theme of disease prevention. The symposium featured some of the speakers who had contributed to Science special feature on this topic on September 21st. Abstracts of the talks are featured below.
Martin Roland (University of Cambridge)
The global burden of illness is shifting from acute infectious disease to chronic conditions such as diabetes and heart disease. Healthcare systems are adapting slowly to this change and even the most expensive systems show big gaps between the care that patients should receive and the care they actually get. In this talk, I will review what we know about deficiencies in quality of care (the 'Quality Chasm'), and how health services can be organised to provide better care. I will draw particularly on evidence on the role of incentives in improving quality of care.