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Antimicrobial therapies have played an unquestionably important role in advancing modern medical and surgical care, treating animals, reducing the global burden of communicable disease, and prolonging human life expectancy. These transformational benefits are threatened because of the rapidly advancing phenomenon of antimicrobial resistance. As a result of complex factors across many sectors and international actors, the global impact of antimicrobial resistance is an escalating economic and health crisis. This article draws on the collective expertise and summit report of the Antimicrobial Resistance Working Group from the 2013 World Innovation Summit for Health, in Doha, Qatar. It defines a framework of principles and tasks for key policy makers to raise international awareness of antimicrobial resistance and lead transformative action through policy-driven improvements in sanitation, antimicrobial conservation, agricultural practices, and research and development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Health care systems are under increasing pressure to cope with shifting demographics, the threat of chronic and noncommunicable disease, and rising health care costs. The uptake of innovations to meet these challenges and to advance medicine and health care delivery is not as rapid as the pace of change. Greater emphasis on the diffusion of innovation and greater understanding of the structural and organizational levers that can be used to facilitate systemwide improvement are essential. This article describes the results of a qualitative and quantitative study to assess the factors and behaviors that foster the adoption of health care innovation in eight countries: Australia, Brazil, England, India, Qatar, South Africa, Spain, and the United States. It describes the front-line cultural dynamics that must be fostered to achieve cost-effective and high-impact transformation of health care, and it argues that there is a necessity for greater focus on vital, yet currently underused, organizational action to support the adoption of innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From 2011 to 2030, mental health conditions are projected to cost the global economy $16 trillion through lost labor and capital output. The gold standard of psychological interventions, one-on-one therapy, is too costly and too labor-intensive to keep up with the projected growth in demand for mental health services. Therefore, new solutions are needed to improve the efficiency of mental health care delivery and to increase patient self-care. Because 85 percent of the world's population has wireless signal coverage, there is an unprecedented opportunity for mobile technologies to incorporate psychological self-care into people’s daily lives and relieve workforce shortages. In this article, we suggest that policy makers look to technology innovators for guidance. For example, Google’s principles, called “Ten Things We Know To Be True,” are useful for understanding the drivers of success in mobile technologies. For principles such as “focus on the user and all else will follow,” we identify examples of how evidence-based mobile mental health technologies could increase patient self-care and reduce the demand for one-on-one psychological intervention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Provision for end-of-life care around the world is widely variable and often poor, which leads to millions of deaths each year among people without access to essential aspects of care. However, some low- and middle-income countries have improved specific aspects of end-of-life care using innovative strategies and approaches such as international partnerships, community-based programs, and philanthropic initiatives. This article reviews the state of current global end-of-life care and examines how innovation has improved end-of-life care in Nigeria, Uganda, India, Bangladesh, Myanmar, and Jordan. Specifically, we examine how opioids have been made more available for the treatment of pain, and how training and education programs have expanded the provision of care to the dying population. Finally, we recommend actions that policy makers and individuals can take to improve end-of-life care, regardless of the income level in a country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Accountable care—a way to align health care payments with patient-focused reform goals—is currently being pursued in the United States, but its principles are also being applied in many other countries. In this article we review experiences with such reforms to offer a globally applicable definition of an accountable care system and propose a conceptual framework for characterizing and assessing accountable care reforms. The framework consists of five components: population, outcomes, metrics and learning, payments and incentives, and coordinated delivery. We describe how the framework applies to accountable care reforms that are already being implemented in Spain and Singapore. We also describe how it can be used to map progress through increasingly sophisticated levels of reforms. We recommend that policy makers pursuing accountable care reforms emphasize the following steps: highlight population health and wellness instead of just treating illness; pay for outcomes instead of activities; create a more favorable environment for collaboration and coordinated care; and promote interoperable data systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The energy of patients and members of the public worldwide who care about improving health is a huge, but still largely unrecognized and untapped, resource. The aim of patient engagement is to shift the clinical paradigm from determining “what is the matter?” to discovering “what matters to you?” This article presents four case studies from around the world that highlight the proven and potential abilities of increased patient engagement to improve health outcomes and reduce costs, while extending the reach of treatment and diagnostic programs into the community. The cases are an online mental health community in the United Kingdom, a genetic screening program in the United Arab Emirates, a World Health Organization checklist for new mothers, and a hospital-based patient engagement initiative in the United States. Evidence from these and similar endeavors suggests that closer collaboration on the part of patients, families, health care providers, health care systems, and policy makers at multiple levels could help diverse nations provide more effective and population-appropriate health care with fewer resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The global epidemic of obesity continues to escalate. Obesity accounts for an increasing proportion of the international socioeconomic burden of noncommunicable disease. Online social networking services provide an effective medium through which information may be exchanged between obese and overweight patients and their health care providers, potentially contributing to superior weight-loss outcomes. We performed a systematic review and meta-analysis to assess the role of these services in modifying body mass index (BMI). Our analysis of twelve studies found that interventions using social networking services produced a modest but significant 0.64 percent reduction in BMI from baseline for the 941 people who participated in the studies' interventions. We recommend that social networking services that target obesity should be the subject of further clinical trials. Additionally, we recommend that policy makers adopt reforms that promote the use of anti-obesity social networking services, facilitate multistakeholder partnerships in such services, and create a supportive environment to confront obesity and its associated noncommunicable diseases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The vast amount of health data generated and stored around the world each day offers significant opportunities for advances such as the real-time tracking of diseases, predicting disease outbreaks, and developing health care that is truly personalized. However, capturing, analyzing, and sharing health data is difficult, expensive, and controversial. This article explores four central questions that policy makers should consider when developing public policy for the use of “big data” in health care. We discuss what aspects of big data are most relevant for health care and present a taxonomy of data types and levels of access. We suggest that successful policies require clear objectives and provide examples, discuss barriers to achieving policy objectives based on a recent policy experiment in the United Kingdom, and propose levers that policy makers should consider using to advance data sharing. We argue that the case for data sharing can be won only by providing real-life examples of the ways in which it can improve health care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The World Health Organization recommends that all countries develop a cancer control program. Qatar is the first country in the Gulf Cooperation Council to develop such a plan, with its National Cancer Strategy 2011-2016. Three years into implementation, meaningful progress has been made, particularly in reducing patient waiting times, creating a multidisciplinary approach to cancer treatment, and fostering international research collaboration. Challenges include attracting sufficient numbers of trained health care workers, reaching a diverse population with messages tailored to their needs, and emphasizing cancer prevention and early detection in addition to research and treatment. Qatar's example shows that best practices developed in North America, Western Europe, and Australasia can be assimilated in a very different demographic and cultural context when such approaches are tailored to local characteristics and circumstances [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Globally, the majority of people with mental health problems do not receive evidence-based interventions that can transform their lives. We describe six mental health policy actions adopted at the World Innovation Summit for Health in 2013. For each policy action, we offer real-world examples of mental health innovations that governments and health care providers can implement to move toward universal health coverage for mental health. The six policy actions are empowering people with mental health problems and their families, building a diverse mental health workforce, developing collaborative and multidisciplinary mental health teams, using technology to increase access to mental health care, identifying and treating mental health problems early, and reducing premature mortality in people with mental health problems. Challenges to implementing these policy actions include the lack of recognition of mental health as a global health priority and the resulting lack of investment in mental health, the difficulties of integrating mental health into primary care health services because of a scarcity of human and financial resources, and the lack of evidence on the effectiveness and costs of taking innovations to a national scale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]