Author Michael Lewis was recently interviewed by Steve Kroft on 60 Minutes and a quote from that interview was the inspiration and influence for Casino Healthcare."If it wasn't complicated, it wouldn't be allowed to happen. The complexity disguises what's happening. If it's so complicated that you can't understand it - then you can't question it." What he was referencing, of course, was high-speed trading on Wall Street, but the quote could just as easily be applied to healthcare. In fact, it's tailor-made.The statistics prove just how much of a casino the U.S. healthcare system has become.* As a country, we now spend over $10,000 per year - for each person - just on healthcare.* Measured as an economic unit, U.S. Healthcare is now the size of Germany. * Preventable medical errors are now the 3rd leading cause of death in the U.S. (behind cancer and heart disease). * Medical debt is the leading cause of personal bankruptcies in the U.S.* Hospital pricing is determined by a cabal - in secret - and beyond legal challenge.* The Pharmaceutical industry - with profit margins that often eclipse tech giants like Apple and Google - paid out a whopping $15 billion in fines over the last six years - just for off-label drug marketing.* American healthcare was recently ranked dead last when compared to 10 other countries.The system has become so complex and opaque that most Americans have simply given up on understanding how it works. Whole families are crushed in this casino trying to pay for unanticipated medical expenses, many of which are immediate, unavoidable and life threatening. The huge expense might be defensible if the system delivered exceptional quality, but it doesn't. When the World Health Organization last ranked health systems, the U.S. came in at #37 - just ahead of #38 (Slovenia) and behind #36 (Costa Rica).Casino Healthcare is not a theoretical policy book for the elite, but a book that penetrates the blanket of fog surrounding a major - and growing - household expense. With the research and style of an investigative journalist, the book is easy to understand and accessible by every American. The U.S. healthcare system was never designed from whole cloth with a strategic vision or intent, but instead it has evolved through the decades with a host of legislative "patches" and temporary fixes. The reason for this is simple. When a casino is generating profits of this magnitude it's critical to keep the casino humming and almost impossible to close it. Rick Scott - now the Governor of Florida - captured the enormous scale of this challenge with this simple two-sentence quote:"How many businesses do you know that want to cut their revenue in half? That's why the healthcare system won't change the healthcare system." Americans have a right to be angry with how the U.S. healthcare system has been hijacked for revenue and profits. One analyst recently categorized it as "legalized extortion on a national scale." In the same way that Michael Lewis exposed the complexity of high-speed trading on Wall Street, Casino Healthcare will expose the U.S. healthcare system for what it really is - a giant casino of epic proportions where the risks are both personal and nothing less than the health of an entire nation.

Blockchain for Healthcare Systems: Challenges, Privacy, and Securing of Data provides a detailed insight on how to reap the benefits of blockchain technology in healthcare, as the healthcare sector faces several challenges associated with privacy and security issues. It also provides in-depth knowledge regarding blockchain in healthcare and the underlying components. This book explores securing healthcare data using blockchain technology. It discusses challenges and solutions for blockchain technology in the healthcare sector and presents the digital transformation of the healthcare sector using different technologies. It covers the handling of healthcare data/medical records and managing the medical supply chain all using blockchain technology. The contents of this book are highly beneficial to educators, researchers, and others working in a similar domain.

This highly original book is an ethnographic noir of how Big Data profits from patient private health information. The book follows personal health data as it is collected from inside healthcare and beyond to create patient consumer profiles that are sold to marketers. Primarily told through a first-person noir narrative, Ebeling as a sociologist-hard-boiled-detective, investigates Big Data and the trade in private health information by examining the information networks that patient data traverses. The noir narrative reveals the processes that the data broker industry uses to create data commodities—data phantoms or the marketing profiles of patients that are bought by advertisers to directly market to consumers. Healthcare and Big Data considers the implications these “data phantoms” have for patient privacy as well as the very real harm that they can cause.

There is a secret inside healthcare, and it‘s this: We can do healthcare for a lot less money. The only way to do that is to do it a lot better. We know it‘s possible because it is happening now. In pockets and branches across healthcare, people are receiving better healthcare for a lot less. Some employers, states, tribes, and health systems are d

Dr. Doug Peredniareveals how government and insurance company-created complexity is tearing apart the U.S. healthcare system and presents a new model for healthcare reform that will actually work. Leading physician, healthcare expert, and entrepreneur Perednia identifies specific inefficiencies and worthless administrative overhead that is making healthcare inaccessible or unaffordable for millions, driving providers from practice, and adding over half a trillion dollars annually to healthcare spending. Next, he shows how to design a far simpler system: one that delivers care to everyone by drawing on the best of both market efficiency and public "universality." Recent "health care reform" involved 2,000+ pages of complex, special interest-friendly legislation--including 168 new federal committees, program cuts, and higher taxpayer costs. Perednia offers a better way: a logical, comprehensive, and non-partisan and apolitical approach that gives providers and their patients more medical and financial security, enhances competition, would save some $570 billion annually--and still gives individual patients real freedom. This plan isn't wishful thinking: Overhauling America’s Healthcare Machine backs it up with detailed logic and objective calculations. Even after the recent endless debate about healthcare, the system is still broken--and unless it's fixed, it will break us all. Perednia shows how to finally fix it: once and for all.

“We thought we knew what patients needed..."– Dr. James Merlino, Cleveland Clinic Most consumers agree their service experiences with hospitals, clinics, and physicians fall well short of their service experiences with hotels, resorts, and restaurants. So, what would their experiences be like if healthcare providers served them the same way hospitality providers do? Given that both industries share many common service touchpoints, one wonders whether healthcare service providers could adopt principles of hospitality to enhance the patient experience. The insights shared in this book reveal the answer: yes! Rich with original survey data, examples, and interviews with widely admired hospitality and healthcare service practitioners, Hospitable Healthcare is a valuable resource guaranteed to enhance the patient experience. The first of its kind, Hospitable Healthcare introduces healthcare providers to an original service model based on principles the hospitality industry has used to create great guest experiences: PAEER (for Prepare, Anticipate, Engage, Evaluate, Reward). The model addresses four trends impacting healthcare: more patient-directed selection of healthcare service providers; greater transparency in the pricing of healthcare services to promote competition; more direct-to-consumer marketing to attract new patients; and the growing importance of patient satisfaction when payors determine reimbursement. As Shoemaker’s and Yesawich’s work reveals, Hospitable Healthcare is indeed just what the patient ordered!

This book provides an overview of the state of the art in research on and treatment of gambling disorder. As a behavioral addiction, gambling disorder is of increasing relevance to the field of mental health. Research conducted in the last decade has yielded valuable new insights into the characteristics and etiology of gambling disorder, as well as effective treatment strategies. The different chapters of this book present detailed information on the general concept of addiction as applied to gambling, the clinical characteristics, epidemiology and comorbidities of gambling disorder, as well as typical cognitive distortions found in patients with gambling disorder. In addition, the book includes chapters discussing animal models and the genetic and neurobiological underpinnings of the disorder. Further, it is examining treatment options including pharmacological and psychological intervention methods, as well as innovative new treatment approaches. The book also discusses relevant similarities to and differences with substance-related disorders and other behavioral addictions. Lastly, it examines gambling behavior from a cultural perspective, considers possible prevention strategies and outlines future perspectives in the field.