数学中国 Ww. madio. net 136 The UMAP Journal 29.2(2008) to foreign countries for healthcare-have reinforced the apparent need for reform[Kher 2006 but uncertainty remains as to what reforms should be implemented We provide a guideline for improving U. S healthcare. We offera frame- york for comparing and predicting various aspects of healthcare systems We define important terms and identify metrics for measuring quality. We use the combined metrics to rank the healthcare systems of the U.S. Nige- ria, and Sweden; these rankings agree with previous literature and support he effectiveness of our metrics We present a predictive model for a healthcare system that can ac- count for different economic classes. Tests run with this model suggest that putting more emphasis on prevention of illness and shifting toward more-centralized healthcare would greatly benefit the U.S Defining Healthcare What is Healthcare? Healthcare is the utilization of medical knowledge with the intent of maintaining or restoring an individuals health of body or mind. A health care system is a network of facilities and workers with the purpose of ad ministering healthcare to a country s population Quality of Healthcare The quality of a healthcare system should reflect how proficient it is t keeping individuals healthy. However, what is considered healthy can change over time, so we define our terms to accommodate changes in med ical opinions ower time The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development(OECD), a large organization concerned with improving international living stan- dards, defines quality of a national healthcare system as: The degree to which health services for individuals and popula- tions increase the likelihood of desired health outcomes and are con- sistent with current professional knowledge. [2004 A health outcome is a measurable statistic associated with some feature of the overall health of a nation. We take desirable health outcomes to be universal, and we classify a health outcome as desirable or undesirable de- pending on the current consensus of the medical community. For example, an increase in a population'saverage lifespanshould always bedesiredover a decrease, and fewer smokers in a population should always be desired over more smokers [Peto and Lopez. 2000.数学中国ww.madio.net