The future of disease prevention

The success of curative medical strategies calls attention to a lack in the completeness of health care: disease prevention. Bringing prevention appropriately into health care requires five types of effort: 1) broadening the view of health beyond the medical model to include the environment, social services, and personal health habits; 2) improving the science of prevention; 3) institutionalizing preventive services by relating them to all the participants, from the professionals to the government to the payers to the public; 4) encouraging non-physician health professionals to assume their suitable, possibly majority, share of providing preventive services; and 5) emphasizing preventive services notwithstanding an unevenness of access to them.