For better health care in the US, Arizona State University's Michael Crow suggests that the National Institute of Health be restructured to focus more on health care outcomes. He tells The Scientist's Hannah Waters about his idea for a three-institute system, which he also discusses in this Nature article. One institute would bring together the study of physical, social, and behavioral sciences; the second would focus on measuring health care outcomes; and the third would study the cost of health care delivery. Currently, "our scientific enterprise that works to give us these new approaches to enhance health outcomes is fantastic scientifically, but is too narrow in its scope. It's spread out across these 27 institutes [of the NIH], but it's spread out in a way where it focuses on science outcomes only, as opposed to the broader outcomes of healthcare," Crow tells The Scientist.
(Full disclosure: Waters is a minority investor in GenomeWeb who has no editorial input in our publications.)