The author explores how the corporate transformation of hospitals, HMOs, and the insurance and pharmaceutical industries has resulted in reduction in services, dangerous cost cutting, poor regulation, and corrupt research. He sheds light on the political lobbying and media manipulation that keeps the present system in place. Exposing the shortcomings of reform proposals that do little to alter the status quo, he makes a case for a workable single-payer system. This is an essential read for todayís practitioners, policy makers, healthcare analysts and providers, and all those concerned with the precarious state of Americaís under- and uninsured.

The author explores how the corporate transformation of hospitals, HMOs, and the insurance and pharmaceutical industries has resulted in reduction in services, dangerous cost cutting, poor regulation, and corrupt research. He sheds light on the political lobbying and media manipulation that keeps the present system in place. Exposing the shortcomings of reform proposals that do little to alter the status quo, he makes a case for a workable single-payer system. This is an essential read for today's practitioners, policy makers, healthcare analysts and providers, and all those concerned with the precarious state of America's under- and uninsured.

This new volume illuminates the growing corporate in-roads into the health care system and its probable consequences, especially for physicians and other practitioners. Its fourteen contributors examine both the delivery and supply functions in the health sector in America. Ambulatory care, hospitals, health maintenance organizations, and health promotion activities are each critically dissected. A major thrust of the investigations focuses upon implications for the medical profession, principally how the increased scrutiny over clinical decision making by corporate purchasers and payors threatens the traditional role and relative autonomy of physicians. Varying theoretical perspectives are debated, with an additional Canadian perspective offered.

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

This book is a reference guide for healthcare executives and technology providers involved in the ongoing digital transformation of the healthcare sector. The book focuses specifically on the challenges and opportunities for health systems in their journey toward a digital future. It draws from proprietary research and public information, along with interviews with over one hundred and fifty executives in leading health systems such as Cleveland Clinic, Partners, Mayo, Kaiser, and Intermountain as well as numerous technology and retail providers. The authors explore the important role of technology and that of EHR systems, digital health innovators, and big tech firms in the ongoing digital transformation of healthcare. Importantly, the book draws on the accelerated learnings of the healthcare sector during the COVID-19 pandemic in their digital transformation efforts to adopt telehealth and virtual care models. Features of this book: Provides an understanding of the current state of digital transformation and the factors influencing the ongoing transformation of the healthcare sector. Includes interviews with executives from leading health systems. Describes the important role of emerging technologies; EHR systems, digital health innovators, and more. Includes case studies from innovative health organizations. Provides a set of templates and frameworks for developing and implementing a digital roadmap. Based on best practices from real-life examples, the book is a guidebook that provides a set of templates and frameworks for digital transformation practitioners in healthcare.

This book offers a discussion about the dramatic development of healthcare business around the world during the twentieth century. Through a broad range of cases in Asia, Europe and the US, it shows how health was transformed into a fast-growing and diversified industry. Health and medicine have developed as one of the fastest growing sectors of the economy around the world during the twentieth century. However, very little is known about the conditions of their transformation in a big, globalized business. This book discusses the development of health industries, tackling the various activities in manufacturing (drugs, biotechnology, medical devices, etc.), infrastructure (hospital design and construction) and services (nursing care, insurances, hospital management, etc.) in relation to healthcare. The business history of health carried out in this book offers a systemic perspective that includes the producers (companies), practitioners (medical doctors) and users (patients and hospitals) of medical technology, as well as the providers of capital and the bodies responsible for regulating the health system (government). The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal Business History.