Medical schools and residency training programs have traditionally focused their curricula on the basic and clinical sciences. While many programs have made an effort to educate trainees about health care policy, they have rarely connected health policy to its effects on the every day practice of medicine. The case studies available on this site aim to bridge this gap and concisely demonstrate how decisions at the level of practice and hospital administration and the government impact how patients and physicians experience the health care system.

This site can be used in a number of ways to enrich the user's knowledge and assist educators in teaching health care policy to their students.

1) Personal Use of Cases - Medical students, residents, and physicians nationwide can access the cases on our site for free from their personal computers. The format of the cases - leading the reader through a series of clinical encounters over a number of days - allows the user to start and stop a case at his/her leisure. The post-case analysis at the end of each case briefs the user of the key points he/she should have taken away from the case. The student may use the interactive forums to discuss the case with other users, allowing people from different communities to share ideas and experiences. Developed with the input of expert faculty with the needs of trainees in mind, the cases distill key messages that are becoming essential for the practice of medicine.

2) Use of the Cases in Facilitated Discussion - The cases are partly modeled on the format that is in place at the New Pathway curriculum at Harvard Medical School. In this way, they lend themselves to use by small groups; for this reason, we have made the cases available in an easy-to-print PDF format. Students at various medical schools have used the cases to stimulate discourse among their peers. Sessions have been held over lunch and dinner. The adaptable nature of the cases allows discussions to last a single sitting, continue over several different sessions, and be conducted in the presence/absence of a faculty facilitator.

3) Curricular Reform - Many medical school and hospital faculty have reported a desire to teach health care policy, but lack the educational resources to do so. The cases provide a perfect solution. Contained within the cases are the bare essentials of a health care policy curriculum - covering topics like Medicare, the uninsured, health care financing, medical errors, and racial disparities - in a format that easily engages students with little or no exposure to these complex topics. In addition, our partnership with the New England Journal of Medicine allows the user to supplement the cases by accessing selected seminal articles on health care policy with a single click of a mouse button.

4) Interact With Leaders in Health Care - ImproveHealthCare will periodically host chat sessions with health policy leaders in academia, business, and government. These chat sessions will allow users to receive answers to questions that may not be immedicately apparent in our cases or articles. These events will be held regularly and will be advertised by email. Send an email with your address in the subject line to improvehealthcare@gmail.com if you would like to be notified of these events.

Contribute a Case to ImproveHealthCare
While we are confident that the site covers several core concepts well, we are aware that there many other issues that demand attention. We invite users with a particular interest in any topic that fits into the broad categories of "Quality," "Access," and "Disparities," to submit a case that follows our broad guidelines. Click here for guidelines.