Download or read book Fragmented A Doctor s Quest to Piece Together American Health Care written by Ilana Yurkiewicz MD and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2023-07-11 with total page 135 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An award-winning physician-writer exposes how pervasive cracks in the health care system cost us time, energy, and lives—and how we can fix them. There’s an unspoken assumption when we go to see a doctor: the doctor knows our medical story and is making decisions based on that story. But reality frequently falls short. Medical records vanish when we switch doctors. Critical details of life-saving treatment plans get lost in muddled electronic charts. The doctors we see change according to specialty, hospital shifts, or an insurer’s whims. Physician Ilana Yurkiewicz calls this phenomenon fragmentation, and, she argues, it’s the central failure of health care today. In this gripping narrative from medicine’s front lines, Yurkiewicz reveals how a system that doesn’t talk to itself puts insupportable burdens on physicians, patients, and caregivers, forcing them to heroic lengths to hold the pieces together—barely. The stories she tells are at once harrowing and commonplace. A patient narrowly averts an unnecessary, invasive heart procedure by producing a worn rhythm strip he has carried in his pocket for a decade. A man diagnosed with leukemia while visiting from abroad has thirty-one physicians, but no one he can call “his” doctor, with tragic consequences. When Yurkiewicz’s own father falls ill, a culture that incentivizes health care providers to react with quick fixes to the problems immediately before them—often to the neglect of a patient’s overall narrative—leads to weeks of additional suffering and a risky hospital transfer. The system is hanging by a thread, and we need better solutions. Yurkiewicz issues a clear-eyed call for change, naming concrete reforms doctors and policymakers can make, and empowering patients and their loved ones to advocate for themselves in the meantime. Urgent, radiantly humane, and ultimately hopeful, Fragmented a prescription for what really needs fixing in modern medicine.
Download or read book The Fragmentation of U S Health Care written by Einer Elhauge and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2010-03-22 with total page 397 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why is our health care system so fragmented in the care it gives patients? Why is there little coordination amongst the many doctors who treat individual patients, who often even lack access to a common set of medical records? Why is fragmentation a problem even within a single hospital, where errors or miscommunications often seem to result from poor coordination amongst the myriad of professionals treating any one individual patient? Why is health care fragmented both over time, so that too little is spent on preventive care, and across patients, so that resources are often misallocated to the patients who need it least? The Fragmentation of U.S. Health Care: Causes and Solutions approaches these broad questions with a highly interdisciplinary approach. The articles included in the work address legal and regulatory issues, including laws that mandate separate payments for each provider, restrict hospitals or others from controlling or rewarding the set of providers treating a patient to assure coordinated care, and provide affirmative disincentives for coordinating care by paying more for uncoordinated care that requires more services. Business reasons for the current form of hospital organization are considered, and efficiency and design are examined and compared to other industries. The economics of current hospital organization are also taken into account. The authors examine and propose various reforms that make our health care system less fragmented, more efficient, and more medically effective.
Download or read book The Healing of America written by T. R. Reid and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2010-08-31 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Bestseller, with an updated explanation of the 2010 Health Reform Bill "Important and powerful . . . a rich tour of health care around the world." —Nicholas Kristof, The New York Times Bringing to bear his talent for explaining complex issues in a clear, engaging way, New York Times bestselling author T. R. Reid visits industrialized democracies around the world--France, Britain, Germany, Japan, and beyond--to provide a revelatory tour of successful, affordable universal health care systems. Now updated with new statistics and a plain-English explanation of the 2010 health care reform bill, The Healing of America is required reading for all those hoping to understand the state of health care in our country, and around the world. T. R. Reid's latest book, A Fine Mess: A Global Quest for a Simpler, Fairer, and More Efficient Tax System, is also available from Penguin Press.
Download or read book The Truth About Health Care written by David Mechanic and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2006-08-04 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The United States spends greatly more per person on health care than any other country but the evidence shows that care is often poor and inappropriate. Despite expenditures of 1.7 trillion dollars in 2003, and growing substantially each year, services remain fragmented and poorly coordinated, and more than 46 million people are uninsured. Why can't America, with its vast array of resources, sophisticated technologies, superior medical research and educational institutions, and talented health care professionals, produce higher quality care and better outcomes? In The Truth about Health Care, David Mechanic explains how health care in America has evolved in ways that favor a myriad of economic, professional, and political interests over those of patients. While money has always had a place in medical care, "big money" and the quest for profits has become dominant, making meaningful reforms difficult to achieve. Mechanic acknowledges that railing against these influences, which are here to stay, can achieve only so much. Instead, he asks whether it is possible to convert what is best about health care in America into a well functioning system that better serves the entire population. Bringing decades of experience as an active health policy participant, researcher, teacher, and consultant to the public and private sectors, Mechanic examines the strengths and weaknesses of our system and how it has evolved. He pays special attention to areas often neglected in policy discussions, such as the loss of public trust in medicine, the tragic state of long-term care, and the relationship of mental health to health care. For anyone who has been frustrated by uncoordinated health networks, insurance denials, and other obstacles to obtaining appropriate care, this book will provide a refreshing and frank look at the system's current and future dilemmas. Mechanic's thoughtful roadmap describes how health plans, healthcare professionals, policymakers, and consumer groups can work together to improve access, quality, fairness, and health outcomes in America. About the Author:
Download or read book One Doctor written by Brendan Reilly and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2013-09-03 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A first-person narrative that takes readers inside the medical profession as one doctor solves real-life medical mysteries"--Provided by publisher.
Download or read book The Fragmentation of U S Health Care written by Einer Elhauge and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why is the American health care system so fragmented in the care it gives patients? This title approaches this question and more with a highly interdisciplinary approach. The articles included in the work address legal and regulatory issues, including laws that mandate separate payments for each provider.
Download or read book Unaccountable written by Marty Makary and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2013-10-15 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Argues for more transparent, democratic and safer healthcare practices to keep patients better informed and hold poor-performing doctors and flawed systems accountable.
Download or read book An American Sickness written by Elisabeth Rosenthal and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2017-04-11 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times bestseller/Washington Post Notable Book of 2017/NPR Best Books of 2017/Wall Street Journal Best Books of 2017 "This book will serve as the definitive guide to the past and future of health care in America.”—Siddhartha Mukherjee, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Emperor of All Maladies and The Gene At a moment of drastic political upheaval, An American Sickness is a shocking investigation into our dysfunctional healthcare system - and offers practical solutions to its myriad problems. In these troubled times, perhaps no institution has unraveled more quickly and more completely than American medicine. In only a few decades, the medical system has been overrun by organizations seeking to exploit for profit the trust that vulnerable and sick Americans place in their healthcare. Our politicians have proven themselves either unwilling or incapable of reining in the increasingly outrageous costs faced by patients, and market-based solutions only seem to funnel larger and larger sums of our money into the hands of corporations. Impossibly high insurance premiums and inexplicably large bills have become facts of life; fatalism has set in. Very quickly Americans have been made to accept paying more for less. How did things get so bad so fast? Breaking down this monolithic business into the individual industries—the hospitals, doctors, insurance companies, and drug manufacturers—that together constitute our healthcare system, Rosenthal exposes the recent evolution of American medicine as never before. How did healthcare, the caring endeavor, become healthcare, the highly profitable industry? Hospital systems, which are managed by business executives, behave like predatory lenders, hounding patients and seizing their homes. Research charities are in bed with big pharmaceutical companies, which surreptitiously profit from the donations made by working people. Patients receive bills in code, from entrepreneurial doctors they never even saw. The system is in tatters, but we can fight back. Dr. Elisabeth Rosenthal doesn't just explain the symptoms, she diagnoses and treats the disease itself. In clear and practical terms, she spells out exactly how to decode medical doublespeak, avoid the pitfalls of the pharmaceuticals racket, and get the care you and your family deserve. She takes you inside the doctor-patient relationship and to hospital C-suites, explaining step-by-step the workings of a system badly lacking transparency. This is about what we can do, as individual patients, both to navigate the maze that is American healthcare and also to demand far-reaching reform. An American Sickness is the frontline defense against a healthcare system that no longer has our well-being at heart.
Download or read book Zero Harm How to Achieve Patient and Workforce Safety in Healthcare written by Craig Clapper and published by McGraw Hill Professional. This book was released on 2018-11-09 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the nation’s leading experts in healthcare safety—the first comprehensive guide to delivering care that ensures the safety of patients and staff alike. One of the primary tenets among healthcare professionals is, “First, do no harm.” Achieving this goal means ensuring the safety of both patient and caregiver. Every year in the United States alone, an estimated 4.8 million hospital patients suffer serious harm that is preventable. To address this industry-wide problem—and provide evidence-based solutions—a team of award-winning safety specialists from Press Ganey/Healthcare Performance Improvement have applied their decades of experience and research to the subject of patient and workforce safety. Their mission is to achieve zero harm in the healthcare industry, a lofty goal that some hospitals have already accomplished—which you can, too. Combining the latest advances in safety science, data technology, and high reliability solutions, this step-by-step guide shows you how to implement 6 simple principles in your workplace. 1. Commit to the goal of zero harm.2. Become more patient-centric.3. Recognize the interdependency of safety, quality, and patient-centricity.4. Adopt good data and analytics.5. Transform culture and leadership.6. Focus on accountability and execution. In Zero Harm, the world’s leading safety experts share practical, day-to-day solutions that combine the latest tools and technologies in healthcare today with the best safety practices from high-risk, yet high-reliability industries, such as aviation, nuclear power, and the United States military. Using these field-tested methods, you can develop new leadership initiatives, educate workers on the universal skills that can save lives, organize and train safety action teams, implement reliability management systems, and create long-term, transformational change. You’ll read case studies and success stories from your industry colleagues—and discover the most effective ways to utilize patient data, information sharing, and other up-to-the-minute technologies. It’s a complete workplace-ready program that’s proven to reduce preventable errors and produce measurable results—by putting the patient, and safety, first.
Download or read book On Becoming a Healer written by Saul J. Weiner and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2020-04-07 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An invaluable guide to becoming a competent and compassionate physician. Medical students and physicians-in-training embark on a long journey that, although steeped in scientific learning and technical skill building, includes little guidance on the emotional and interpersonal dimensions of becoming a healer. Written for anyone in the health care community who hopes to grow emotionally and cognitively in the way they interact with patients, On Becoming a Healer explains how to foster doctor-patient relationships that are mutually nourishing. Dr. Saul J. Weiner, a physician-educator, argues that joy in medicine requires more than idealistic aspirations—it demands a capacity to see past the "otherness" that separates the well from the sick, the professional in a white coat from the disheveled patient in a hospital gown. Weiner scrutinizes the medical school indoctrination process and explains how it molds the physician's mindset into that of a task completer rather than a thoughtful professional. Taking a personal approach, Weiner describes his own journey to becoming an internist and pediatrician while offering concrete advice on how to take stock of your current development as a physician, how to openly and fully engage with patients, and how to establish clear boundaries that help defuse emotionally charged situations. Readers will learn how to counter judgmentalism, how to make medical decisions that take into account the whole patient, and how to incorporate the organizing principle of healing into their practice. Each chapter ends with questions for reflection and discussion to help personalize the lessons for individual learners.
Download or read book Healthcare 911 written by Bhupendra O. Khatri and published by Henschelhaus Publishing, Incorporated. This book was released on 2018-02 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: America's healthcare crisis - Is there a solution? In this era of corporate takeovers, the age-old art of medicine is the first casualty. At least one physician commits suicide every day! Countless others experience stress, depression, burnout, and medical conditions, ranging from obesity to heart attacks. Healthcare 911 pulls back the curtain on the causes and consequences of this crisis, as well as the future of the American system of caring for the sick if it is not solved.
Download or read book Uncaring written by Robert Pearl and published by PublicAffairs. This book was released on 2021-05-18 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Doctors are taught how to cure people. But they don’t always know how to care for them. Hardly anyone is happy with American healthcare these days. Patients are getting sicker and going bankrupt from medical bills. Doctors are burning out and making dangerous mistakes. Both parties blame our nation’s outdated and dysfunctional healthcare system. But that’s only part of the problem. In this important and timely book, Dr. Robert Pearl shines a light on the unseen and often toxic culture of medicine. Today’s physicians have a surprising disdain for technology, an unhealthy obsession with status, and an increasingly complicated relationship with their patients. All of this can be traced back to their earliest experiences in medical school, where doctors inherit a set of norms, beliefs, and expectations that shape almost every decision they make, with profound consequences for the rest of us. Uncaring draws an original and revealing portrait of what it’s actually like to be a doctor. It illuminates the complex and intimidating world of medicine for readers, and in the end offers a clear plan to save American healthcare.
Download or read book The Rise and Fall of the American Medical Empire written by Robert A. Linden and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There are four major dilemmas at work in the rapid decline of the United States' healthcare system: the disappearing primary care sector, healthcare insurance reform, the influence of the pharmaceutical industry on the practice of medicine, and reform of malpractice litigation. In this book, Dr. Robert A. Linden provides a comprehensive explanation of these dilemmas, from the perspective of a primary care physician who has spent 30 years working directly with patients and seeing first-hand how changes in the system have impacted patients and physicians. Dr. Linden sorts out the fragments of information that most readers get through the media and fills in the blanks to provide a clear picture of what's wrong with the U.S. healthcare system, an impartial review of proposed solutions, and a look at what other countries have done to reform their healthcare systems. Unlike many academician authors who have covered the problems only in part with skewed information, this book will finally help the healthcare consumer understand the problems facing us and form their own assessments of what should be done to restore the American healthcare system.
Download or read book Health Care for Some written by Beatrix Hoffman and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2012-09-15 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 2010 Affordable Care Act is a sweeping reform to the US health care system. Hoffman offers an engaging and in-depth look at America's long tradition of unequal access to health care. She argues that two main features have characterized the US health system: a refusal to adopt a right to care and a particularly American type of rationing. Unlike rationing in most countries, which is intended to keep costs down, rationing in the United States has actually led to increased costs, resulting in the most expensive health care system in the world.
Download or read book Which Country Has the World s Best Health Care written by Ezekiel J. Emanuel and published by PublicAffairs. This book was released on 2020-06-16 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The preeminent doctor and bioethicist Ezekiel Emanuel is repeatedly asked one question: Which country has the best healthcare? He set off to find an answer. The US spends more than any other nation, nearly $4 trillion, on healthcare. Yet, for all that expense, the US is not ranked #1 -- not even close. In Which Country Has the World's Best Healthcare? Ezekiel Emanuel profiles eleven of the world's healthcare systems in pursuit of the best or at least where excellence can be found. Using a unique comparative structure, the book allows healthcare professionals, patients, and policymakers alike to know which systems perform well, and why, and which face endemic problems. From Taiwan to Germany, Australia to Switzerland, the most inventive healthcare providers tackle a global set of challenges -- in pursuit of the best healthcare in the world.
Download or read book An Introduction to the US Health Care System written by Steven Jonas, MD, MPH, FACPM and published by Springer Publishing Company. This book was released on 2007-05-25 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Completely expanded and updated to account for the latest changes in the U.S. health care system, this best-selling text remains the most concise and balanced introduction to the domestic health care system. Like its predecessors, it provides an accessible overview of the basic components of the system: healthcare personnel, hospitals and other institutions, the federal government, financing and payment mechanisms, and managed care. Finally, it provides an insightful look at the prospects for health care reform. Steven Jonas, a revered expert in public health, has enlisted his colleagues, Drs. Raymond and Karen Goldsteen, to add their expertise in public health and health policy and management to this outstanding volume. All students of health care administration and policy, as well as practicing healthcare professionals who simply want a relatively brief overview of the system, will find it useful.
Download or read book The Case for Universal Health Care written by David Colton and published by SCB Distributors. This book was released on 2019-10-01 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the exception of the United States, all developed nations provide their citizens with quality, affordable health care. And, despite its having expanded access through such programs as Medicare, Medicaid, SCHIP, and the Affordable Care Act, nearly 20 million Americans still do not have health insurance. The cost of providing care in the United States will soon be unsustainable. It surely makes sense to consider an option that ensures health care is accessible to all its citizens and is fully funded regardless of vicissitudes in the national economy. This book is a must read for anyone concerned with the failure of the current system and looking for an alternative. Colton’s proposal for universal health care is thoroughly explained including: a description of services provided how we’ll pay for it how it is organized for delivery why it will save consumers money, and how it will ensure standards for quality and clinical effectiveness. “In this incisive and comprehensive book, David Colton take on the formidable task of explaining how America’s health care system works, why it fails in terms of cost, efficiency and quality of care and why it must be reformed... an invaluable resource ...” JILL QUADAGNO, Author, One Nation Uninsured: Why the US Has No National Health Insurance “...an excellent book, making a most unwieldy subject accessible and interesting to read. He deftly brings in pop culture, personal stories, and history in a way that brings this important public policy question come alive...” JULIE SALAMON, author, Hospital “A must read for anyone concerned about America’s health care system, especially those advocating for single-payor and “Medicare for All”... Highly recommended.” STEVEN A. MOSHER, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus of Health Care Administration
