NEW ABRAMSON FAMILY CENTER FOR THE FUTURE OF HEALTH LAUNCHES
PROGRAMS TO BETTER INFORM CONSUMERS, IMPROVE HEALTH CARE INDUSTRY

With so much information about medical conditions now available to the average person, it’s hard to know what to pay attention to -- especially during the stressful time immediately following a disturbing diagnosis.

The new Abramson Family Center for the Future of Health (AFCFH) is dedicated to helping people better understand their choices and to improving the health care industry in general.

The center is a joint endeavor of The Methodist Hospital and the University of Houston, one of the first projects resulting from a far-ranging partnership between the two institutions announced earlier this year. It will be officially launched at a media briefing at 10 a.m., Wednesday, Sept. 7, in the Houston Science Center at UH.

“There is nobody more interested in your health than yourself. One of the center’s goals is to give people the power to make truly informed decisions about their own health,” said Dr. Cliff Dacso, the center’s director, who holds the John S. Dunn Sr. Research Chair in general internal medicine at The Methodist Hospital and is Distinguished Professor of Technology at UH.

To that end, AFCFH is implementing a “decisioning” model based on the work of Yakov Ben-Haim of Israel’s Technion University that presents medical information in a radically new format that both enlightens an individual and supports personal choice. “Although we’ve seen a tremendous increase in the amount of medical information on the Internet, most of it is pretty worthless,” Dacso said. “But we’re structuring our material in a way that’s directly relevant to the user.”

The center also is undertaking an array of initiatives into medical research, consumer education, programs for developing new health care professions and access to medical care in high-need communities.

“What we accomplish in Houston should become a model for change in health care around the world,” Dacso said.

For more information about AFCFH, visit http://www.tech.uh.edu/departments/afcfh/.