Visions and revisions: viewpoints on nuclear medicine & health care reform. Part 1: Outcomes research.

Although health care reform movements and the strategies that medical societies use to meet the challenges existed long before President Bill Clinton's September 1993 presentation of his reform bill, these strategies have since come into the foreground of medical reform discussions. Medical groups are carefully eying outcomes research as a method to both pinpoint their most effective procedures and to point up the effectiveness of their practice in overall patient care. Practice guidelines promise a way to sift out the optimal procedures and suggest them to all nuclear medicine physicians--to both unify the specialty and perhaps help protect practitioners in malpractice cases. Discussions of the specialty physician workforce question the need and practicality of any policy that substitutes generalists for specialists. And vigilance over the several pieces of legislation currently sifting through Congress alert members of specialty societies about political developments and how to influence congressmen. The question remains, are these strategies being employed in such a way as to best pull a specialty like nuclear medicine through the gantlet and optimize health care provision in the US? This four-part series will explore this question.