The New York Times Science Bestseller from Robert Wachter, Modern Healthcare’s #1 Most Influential Physician-Executive in the US While modern medicine produces miracles, it also delivers care that is too often unsafe, unreliable, unsatisfying, and impossibly expensive. For the past few decades, technology has been touted as the cure for all of healthcare’s ills. But medicine stubbornly resisted computerization – until now. Over the past five years, thanks largely to billions of dollars in federal incentives, healthcare has finally gone digital. Yet once clinicians started using computers to actually deliver care, it dawned on them that something was deeply wrong. Why were doctors no longer making eye contact with their patients? How could one of America’s leading hospitals give a teenager a 39-fold overdose of a common antibiotic, despite a state-of-the-art computerized prescribing system? How could a recruiting ad for physicians tout the absence of an electronic medical record as a major selling point? Logically enough, we’ve pinned the problems on clunky software, flawed implementations, absurd regulations, and bad karma. It was all of those things, but it was also something far more complicated. And far more interesting . . . Written with a rare combination of compelling stories and hard-hitting analysis by one of the nation’s most thoughtful physicians, The Digital Doctor examines healthcare at the dawn of its computer age. It tackles the hard questions, from how technology is changing care at the bedside to whether government intervention has been useful or destructive. And it does so with clarity, insight, humor, and compassion. Ultimately, it is a hopeful story. "We need to recognize that computers in healthcare don’t simply replace my doctor’s scrawl with Helvetica 12," writes the author Dr. Robert Wachter. "Instead, they transform the work, the people who do it, and their relationships with each other and with patients. . . . Sure, we should have thought of this sooner. But it’s not too late to get it right." This riveting book offers the prescription for getting it right, making it essential reading for everyone – patient and provider alike – who cares about our healthcare system.

We live in a transformational time in the history of medicine and health care. The twenty-first century will be a time of dramatic change, incredible breakthroughs, and totally altered thinking about health, medicine, and health care delivery. This book sets forth what health care and medicine will look like in the years ahead. It takes a look at history, the transformational changes going on today, the health of Americans, the nine dynamic flows that are shaping health care in the United States, and definitions and descriptions of the new institutions of the future landscape of health care and medicine. It is already being called THE book to intelligently shape and guide the discussion and reorganization of health care reform in America. From leading futurist David Houle (recently named "Speaker of the Year" by Vistage International) and leading healthcare attorney Jonathan Fleece, comes this surprising, innovative look at the future of healthcare--and how we can lead the successful reorganization of healthcare in America.

Mike Auburn dangles above the city of Chicago from the beams of a half-built skyscraper. He is seconds from plummeting towards the circuit board of buildings and streetlights below, but oblivion is not what he seeks—it’s the dead. Obsessed with discovering evidence of the afterlife, Mike’s death-defying stunts have brought him closer than ever to lifting the veil of reality, always just out of reach. However, his ventures to the edge have not gone unnoticed, and a mysterious organization by the name “O’Neill” seeks to recruit him to their own cause: preparing the city for impending Ragnarok, the end of the world as they know it. Before long, a world ruled by scientific method and rational thinking is challenged by the supernatural—luring the dead, the damned, and the demons that have long awaited the return of magic, and they will stop at nothing to bring it back for good. Suddenly, Mike is at the center of a battle between the forces of reason, of good, of evil...and everything in between.

We live in a transformational time in the history of medicine and health care. The twenty-first century will be a time of dramatic change, incredible breakthroughs, and totally altered thinking about health, medicine, and health care delivery. This book sets forth what health care and medicine will look like in the years ahead. It takes a look at history, the transformational changes going on today, the health of Americans, the nine dynamic flows that are shaping health care in the United States, and definitions and descriptions of the new institutions of the future landscape of health care and medicine. It is already being called THE book to intelligently shape and guide the discussion and reorganization of health care reform in America. From leading futurist David Houle (recently named "Speaker of the Year" by Vistage International) and leading healthcare attorney Jonathan Fleece, comes this surprising, innovative look at the future of healthcare--and how we can lead the successful reorganization of healthcare in America.