Safe, Effective and Cost-Efficient Healthcare

Safe, Effective and Cost-Efficient Healthcare Student’s Name Institutional Affiliation  Safe, Effective, and Cost-Efficient Healthcare Most developed countries are struggling with a large fraction of healthcare budget both in governmental and private sectors. Health care professionals can play a crucial in minimizing costs, promoting safe health care practices and increasing effectiveness. One method they can apply to achieve all these is through the use of comparative effectiveness research (McGinnis et al., 2011). Through this research, care providers will obtain appropriate information that they can use to compare the effectiveness, costs, and safety of various diagnostic and treatment interventions. For instance, healthcare-related to breast cancer is a good example. In the past, there was only one therapeutic option for breast cancer referred to as radical mastectomy. Nevertheless, today, the condition is viewed as a complex problem with a cluster of conditions that require different diagnostic methods such as estrogen sensitivity to genetic predisposition to metastases and tumor cell mass characterization (McGinnis et al., 2011). Likewise, there are several therapeutic options for treatment of these conditions, including radiology, chemotherapy, and surgery. While breast cancer is one of the widely studied diseases, several and encouraging therapeutic and diagnostic approaches are making it difficult for patients and professionals to choose the best option for a particular individual. Thus, it is important for healthcare professionals to extensively research on various diagnostic and therapeutic approaches as well management practices and compare them to use the suitable ones on appropriate individual (McGinnis et al., 2011). This way, the funds wasted on misdiagnosis and treatment will be significantly cut. In addition, correct diagnosis translates to effective treatment and increased safety. Another important method that can be used by care providers to reduce cost and increase safety of care is appropriate use criteria (AUC) which is an approach that specifies when it is suitable to perform a particular medical procedure or service (Hend...