This Article  • Full text  • PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Citation map  • Citing articles on Web of Science (1)  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Similar articles in JAMA  Topic Collections  • Medical Practice  • Health Policy  • Medical Practice, Other  • Quality of Care  • Quality of Care, Other  • Alert me on articles by topic  Social Bookmarking   What's this?

Robert H. Brook, MD, ScD

JAMA. 2009;302(9):997-998.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

Health care reform in the United States is likely to fail without fundamental changes in the practice of medicine. What can be done within a year to substantially increase the likelihood that Americans receive appropriate, humane, affordable care? A starting point is to draw on more than 2 decades of empirical research based on the RAND/University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) Appropriateness Method (RUAM) to develop explicit criteria for determining the appropriateness of care.^1-2 Physicians and patients can use the results from applying this method to make better informed decisions about expensive, elective procedures or diagnostic tests, and the process of developing the criteria will strengthen the clinical evidence base.

The RUAM was developed more than 20 years ago in an effort to understand why quality of care in the United States, and in other developed countries, varied so substantially. The method uses a structured . . . [Full Text of this Article]

Author Affiliation: RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, California; and David Geffen School of Medicine and School of Public Health, University of California, Los Angeles.

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter     What's this?