“CLINECS”: Strategy and Tactics to Provide Evidence of the Usefulness of Health Care Services from the Patient's Perspective (Value for Patients)

Most attempts to describe the value of health care were market oriented and left the aspects of effectiveness with the care providers (Roberts, 1989; van de Ven, 1996). A recent approach entitled “Evidence-Based to Value-Based Medicine” (Brown et al., 2005) provides an elegant link between health economics and evidence-based medicine but does not include the final step from evidence-based to everyday medicine. In this chapter, we define the term “CLINECS.” The term was created by fusing the names of the disciplines that contribute to the assessment of useful health care services, that is, clinical practice, clinical epidemiology, health economics, psychology, ethics, and philosophy (Table 1.1).