Explains how employers can take control of the increasing burden of health care costs, using the approach taken by Serigraph, a company that focused on consumer responsibility, primary care, and centers of value, as a model for improving health care while lowering the cost.

New York Times bestseller Business Book of the Year--Association of Business Journalists From the New York Times bestselling author comes an eye-opening, urgent look at America's broken health care system--and the people who are saving it--now with a new Afterword by the author. "A must-read for every American." --Steve Forbes, editor-in-chief, FORBES One in five Americans now has medical debt in collections and rising health care costs today threaten every small business in America. Dr. Makary, one of the nation's leading health care experts, travels across America and details why health care has become a bubble. Drawing from on-the-ground stories, his research, and his own experience, The Price We Pay paints a vivid picture of the business of medicine and its elusive money games in need of a serious shake-up. Dr. Makary shows how so much of health care spending goes to things that have nothing to do with health and what you can do about it. Dr. Makary challenges the medical establishment to remember medicine's noble heritage of caring for people when they are vulnerable. The Price We Pay offers a road map for everyday Americans and business leaders to get a better deal on their health care, and profiles the disruptors who are innovating medical care. The movement to restore medicine to its mission, Makary argues, is alive and well--a mission that can rebuild the public trust and save our country from the crushing cost of health care.

Cracking Health Costs reveals the best ways for companies and small businesses to fight back, right now, against rising health care costs. This book proposes multiple, practical steps that you can take to control costs and increase the effectiveness of the health benefit. The book is all about rolling back health care costs to save companies and employees money. Working hand-in-hand with their employees, businesses need to ensure that, whenever feasible, employees with the most expensive diagnoses get optimal treatment at hospitals not practicing “volume-driven” medicine for higher profits. Less than 10% of employees incur 80% of costs. About 20% of patients have been completely misdiagnosed, while many others are simply the victims of surgeons who are either practicing bad medicine or overtreating for profit. For example, some companies, such as Walmart and Lowe’s, are turning to the “Centers of Excellence” approach author Tom Emerick helped to pioneer while running benefits for Walmart. By determining which hospitals are adopting the highest standards of care, benefits managers can reduce the number of unnecessary high-cost surgeries and improve employees’ overall health. The solution-based approach offered by the book is unique, because it can be implemented by businesses today.

For decades, the manufacturing industry has employed the Toyota Production System the most powerful production method in the world to reduce waste, improve quality, reduce defects and increase worker productivity. In 2001, Virginia Mason Medical Center, an integrated healthcare delivery system in Seattle, Washington set out to achieve its compe

Note to Readers: Publisher does not guarantee quality or access to any included digital components if book is purchased through a third-party seller. Applied Problem-Solving in Healthcare Management is a practical textbook devoted to developing and strengthening problem-solving and decision-making leadership competencies of healthcare administration students and healthcare management professionals. Built upon the University of Minnesota Master of Healthcare Administration Program’s Problem-Solving Method, the text describes the “never assume” mindset and the structured method that drive evidence-based, action-oriented problem-solving. The “never assume” mindset requires healthcare leaders to understand themselves and their stakeholders, and to engage in waves of divergent and convergent thinking. This structured method guides the problem solver through the phases of defining, studying, and acting on complex interrelated organizational problems that involve multiple root causes. The book also describes how the Problem-Solving Method is complementary to quality improvement methods and can be used in healthcare organizations along with Lean, Design Thinking, and Human Centered Design. Providing step-by-step instruction including useful tips, tools, activities, and case studies, this effective resource demonstrates the utility of the method for all types of health organization settings including health systems, hospitals, clinics, population health, and long-term care. For students taking health management, capstone, and experiential learning courses, including internship and residency projects, this book allows them to test and apply their problem-solving and decision-making skills to real-world situations. Beyond the classroom, it is an indispensable resource for organizations seeking to enhance the problem-solving skills of their workforce. The authors of the text have nearly 75 years of combined experience in healthcare management, leadership, and professional consulting, and teaching and advising healthcare administration students in classrooms, on student capstone, internship and residency projects, and case competitions. Synthesizing their expertise, this text serves as a guide for those who wish to strengthen their problem-solving abilities to systematically identify, analyze, study, and solve pressing organizational challenges in healthcare settings. Key Features: Describes a mindset and a structured problem-solving method that builds leadership competencies Encourages a step-by-step problem-solving approach to define, study, and act on problems to drive action-oriented solutions Supports experiential learning and coaching for students and professionals early in their careers, applicable especially to healthcare management, capstone, and student consulting courses, internship and residency projects, case competitions, and professional development in organizations Compares the Problem-Solving Method to other complementary methods used in many healthcare organizations, including Lean, Design Thinking, and Human Centered Design

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.

That's how Wendell Potter introduced himself to a Senate committee in June 2009. He proceed to explain how insurance companies make promises they have no intention of keeping, how they flout regulations designed to protect consumers, and how they make it nearly impossible to understand information that the public needs. Potter quit his high-paid job as head of public relations at a major insurance corporation because he could no longer abide the routine practices of the insurance industry, policies that amounted to a death sentence for thousands of Americans every year. In Deadly Spin, Potter takes readers behind the scenes of the insurance industry to show how a huge chunk of our absurd healthcare expenditures actually bankrolls a propaganda campaign and lobbying effort focused on protecting one thing: profits. With the unique vantage of both a whistleblower and a high-powered former insider, Potter moves beyond the healthcare crisis to show how public relations works, and how it has come to play a massive, often insidious role in our political process-and our lives. This important and timely book tells Potter's remarkable personal story, but its larger goal is to explain how people like Potter, before his change of heart, can get the public to think and act in ways that benefit big corporations-and the Wall Street money managers who own them.