Slow Leaks: Missed Opportunities to Encourage Our Engagement in Our Health Care - Tapa blanda

The gap between the demands placed on us by U.S. health care delivery and the ability of individuals – even the most informed and engaged among us – to meet those demands undermines the quality of our care, escalates its cost and diminishes its positive impact on our health.

What does it take for us and our families to find good care and make the most of it? And what can be done to help those who lack the skills, resources or capacities, or who are already ill, compensate for their inability to do so?

This collection of essays identifies some of the key challenges posed to most of us by health care as it is currently delivered in many settings. None of these challenges is monumental, but each one contributes to the steady erosion in quality of care and to a waste of resources. Each essay identifies a “slow leak” that saps value from the services and technologies we receive and suggests solutions that would benefit us and those who work with us to improve our health.

Jessie Gruman is president and founder of the Center for Advancing Health (www.cfah.org), a nonpartisan, Washington-based policy institute which, since 1992, has been supported by foundations and individuals to work on people's engagement in their health care from the patient perspective. Dr. Gruman draws on her own experience of treatment for five cancer diagnoses, interviews with patients and caregivers, surveys and peer-reviewed research as the basis of her work to describe and advocate for policies and practices to overcome the challenges people face in finding good care and getting the most from it.

Gruman has worked on this same set of concerns in the private sector (AT&T), the public sector (National Cancer Institute) and the voluntary health sector (American Cancer Society).

She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Council on Foreign Relations and is a fellow of the New York Academy of Medicine and the Society for Behavioral Medicine. She was honored by Research!America for her leadership in advocacy for health research and has received honorary doctorates from Brown University, Carnegie Mellon University, Clark University, Georgetown University, New York University, Northeastern University, Salve Regina University, Syracuse University and Tulane University, and the Presidential Medal of the George Washington University.

Gruman holds a B.A. from Vassar College and a Ph.D. in Social Psychology from Columbia University and is a Professorial Lecturer in the School of Public Health and Health Services at the George Washington University.

Dr. Gruman is the author of AfterShock: What to Do When the Doctor Gives You – or Someone You Love – a Devastating Diagnosis (Walker Publishing, second edition, 2010); Slow Leaks: Missed Opportunities to Encourage Our Engagement in Our Health Care (Health Behavior Media, 2013); A Year of Living Sickishly: A Patient Reflects (Health Behavior Media, 2013); The Experience of the American Patient: Risk, Trust and Choice (Health Behavior Media, 2009); Behavior Matters (Health Behavior Media, 2008) as well as scientific papers and opinion essays and articles. She blogs regularly on the Prepared Patient Blog (http://www.cfah.org/blog/) and tweets daily @jessiegruman.