"... understanding how and why care delivery does or does not happen and how to improve it may now represent medicine's most important task."

N Engl J Med. 2013 Dec 19;369(25):2424-36. doi: 10.1056/NEJMsa1310472.

Shattuck Lecture. Chronic infectious disease and the future of health care delivery.

Farmer PE.

Author information

• From the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School, and the Division of Global Health Equity, Brigham and Women's Hospital - both in Boston.

"As compared with discovery science and randomized trials, the 20th-century biomedical paradigm viewed care delivery as scientifically uninteresting — too messy for serious scrutiny, like the observational and qualitative methods that elucidate it. Yet understanding how and why care delivery does or does not happen and how to improve it may now represent medicine's most important task.2"