A Brody School of Medicine professor has co-authored a report issued Thursday that calls Americas health care system too complex and costly, posing a threat to the nations economic stability and global competitiveness.

The report, Best Care at Lower Cost: The Path to Continuously Learning Health Care in America, comes from a committee of the Institute of Medicine and focuses on how the inefficiencies created by an overwhelming amount of data and other economic and quality barriers hinder progress in improving health. The good news is that tools exist to put the health system on the right course to achieve improvement and better quality care at lower cost, committee members said.

We Americans can all get much better results from the health care we receive and pay for, said Dr. T. Bruce Ferguson, professor of cardiovascular sciences at the Brody School of Medicine at East Carolina University and an IOM committee member. The IOM is the health-care arm of the National Academy of Sciences.

The report tries to construct a road map from where the health care system and its users are substantially constrained by unsustainable costs and quality shortfalls to a place where better health care is delivered and received. The vehicle is a system of continuous improvement driven by the commitment of all its participants.

Were trying to expand what weve learned within pocket areas of improvement and apply them to the entire health care system to produce better value and less costs for every person in the system who requires health care, Ferguson said.

The costs of the systems inefficiency underscore the urgent need for a systemwide transformation.

The committee calculated that about 30 percent of health spending in 2009 roughly $750 billion was wasted on unnecessary services, excessive administrative costs, fraud, and other problems. Moreover, inefficiencies cause needless suffering, they said. By one estimate, roughly 75,000 deaths might have been prevented in 2005 if every state had delivered care at the quality level of the best performing state.

The committee identified tools and assets in todays health care environment, some that did not exist as recently as five years ago, and areas where the tools must be applied.

One is an enormous computing power that now allows access to information with connectivity almost anywhere in real time.

When I was a medical student, I had to go to the library to look up articles in journals and photocopy them, Ferguson said. A medical student at Brody logs on to the Internet and accesses hundreds of times more information than I was able to gather.

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Health care too costly, complex