Newsletter
A M ERIC A N ASSOCIATION OF PHY SICIST S IN ME D I CI NE VOLUME 33 NO. 4
JULY/AUGUST 2008
AAPM President’s Column
Gerald A. White Colorado Springs, CO
A
few weeks ago I attended several lectures at our local liberal arts college (Colorado College— home of the 2009 AAPM Summer School) held as part of a course and public symposium on Health Care Policy. It was well organized and, interestingly, featured as faculty people who had been associated with Colorado College, all former faculty or alumna(e). We’ve all had the opportunity to read in these pages much about healthcare policy on a very detailed level. CPT codes and descriptors, changes to the Relative Value Scale for codes that effect imaging and oncology, downward pressure on the conversion factor from RVU’s to dollars, etc. All of these are of great importance to us as medical physicists, and we tend to follow changes or potential changes quite closely. I enjoyed the opportunity in the CC symposium to reflect with others on the larger picture of healthcare delivery and financing structure in the U.S.
“Enjoy” is probably not quite the correct verb. As my family, friends and colleagues can tell you I can become overly engaged in discussions of healthcare quality and accessibility issues in the U.S. System. At the final lecture there was a presentation by a highly placed Microsoft executive working on their unified Electronic Medical Record project. He made the remarkable assertion that the U.S. Healthcare System was the best in the world because people traveled from many countries to seek treatment here. I could barely restrain myself to remain quiet until the Q&A (but I did, with the gentle but firm encouragement of my wife who was seated next to me). There are many metrics associated with understanding the quality of a nation’s healthcare system, but travel by the wealthy is not typically one of them. By any of the standard measurements of quality, our system ranks well below those of other industrialized countries. In the 2005 CIA ranking of infant mortality the U.S. falls in 41st place. In the 2003 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) index of maternal mortality (deaths/100,000 births) we rank behind Germany (2.9), Australia (3.2), Norway (3.6), Sweden (4.2), and Canada (4.6) with an index of 8.9. In the World Health Organization (WHO) 2003 ranking of Healthy Life Expectancy (an index that measures not just years of life but rather years of relatively healthy life) we ranked 29th. The
trend is not improving. In a recent analysis of decline in mortality from amenable causes in 19 industrialized countries, (WHO Database) the United States ranked 19th. The list goes on—the only metric at which we excel is cost of healthcare delivery, where we are at the top of the list (by nearly a factor of 2 compared to many industrialized countries) either as a per-capita cost or as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product. Focused on the delivery of care in the high tech healing modalities, we are often insulated from these issues, at least at the organizational level. But certainly those of us who work in the clinic have seen no shortage of patients who appear for diagnosis (see White p. 4) TABLE OF CONTENTS Chair of the Board’s Column President-Elect’s Column Executive Director’s Column 50th Anniversary update Editor’s Column Professional Council Report Education Council Report Leg. & Reg. Affairs Edu. & Res. Fund Report Health Policy/Economics American Board of Radiology Chapter News Medical Reserve Corps BOD Recommendation MOC & TG-127 Update AAPM-IPEM Travel Grant Rpt. AAPM Travel Grant Rpt. Person in News
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