Healthcare: A Better Way is a handbook for clinical and operational leaders, as well as front-line caregivers, who are involved in improving processes, reducing harm, designing and implementing new care delivery models, and undertaking the difficult task of leading meaningful change on behalf of the patients they serve. The handbook is comprised of eight chapters as described below: PART 1: FORCES DRIVING TRANSFORMATION Chapter 1: Forces defining and shaping the current state of U.S. healthcare Chapter 2: Present and future challenges facing healthcare PART 2: LAYING THE FOUNDATION FOR SUSTAINABLE IMPROVEMENT Chapter 3: A systematic approach to sustainable quality improvement Chapter 4: The analytics system: standard measurement work Chapter 5: The deployment system: standard organizational work Chapter 6: The content system: standard knowledge work PART 3: LOOKING INTO THE FUTURE Chapter 7: Real world examples provide a glimpse into our future Chapter 8: Innovation in healthcare: creating tomorrow
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
GETTING A DOCTOR'S APPOINTMENT SHOULDN'T BE HARDER THAN BOOKING A VACATION The US healthcare system excels in research, innovation, and clinical care, but is failing to keep up with the operational challenges of the digital age. Today's healthcare organizations face immense financial challenges, and their most valuable resources--people, rooms, and equipment--are being used inefficiently. The result? Long wait times for patients, overstressed staff, underused assets, and poor ROI for organizations. Why do health systems struggle with optimization? The fundamental problem is one of matching an unpredictable demand for services with a constrained supply. The math being used to solve this problem is a holdover from the paper-and-pencil era. In Better Healthcare Through Math, authors Mohan Giridharadas and Sanjeev Agrawal show you that there is a better way. Healthcare systems can harness the power of sophisticated, analytics-driven mathematics to optimize the matching of supply and demand. By upgrading to software systems built on better math, they can enable staff to make data-based decisions to flatten peaks of demand and create smoother patient flow.
Drawing on the work of the Roundtable on Evidence-Based Medicine, the 2007 IOM Annual Meeting assessed some of the rapidly occurring changes in health care related to new diagnostic and treatment tools, emerging genetic insights, the developments in information technology, and healthcare costs, and discussed the need for a stronger focus on evidence to ensure that the promise of scientific discovery and technological innovation is efficiently captured to provide the right care for the right patient at the right time. As new discoveries continue to expand the universe of medical interventions, treatments, and methods of care, the need for a more systematic approach to evidence development and application becomes increasingly critical. Without better information about the effectiveness of different treatment options, the resulting uncertainty can lead to the delivery of services that may be unnecessary, unproven, or even harmful. Improving the evidence-base for medicine holds great potential to increase the quality and efficiency of medical care. The Annual Meeting, held on October 8, 2007, brought together many of the nation's leading authorities on various aspects of the issues - both challenges and opportunities - to present their perspectives and engage in discussion with the IOM membership.
Healthcare transformation requires us to continually look at new and better ways to manage insights – both within and outside the organization today. Increasingly, the ability to glean and operationalize new insights efficiently as a byproduct of an organization’s day-to-day operations is becoming vital to hospitals and health systems ability to survive and prosper. One of the long-standing challenges in healthcare informatics has been the ability to deal with the sheer variety and volume of disparate healthcare data and the increasing need to derive veracity and value out of it. Demystifying Big Data and Machine Learning for Healthcare investigates how healthcare organizations can leverage this tapestry of big data to discover new business value, use cases, and knowledge as well as how big data can be woven into pre-existing business intelligence and analytics efforts. This book focuses on teaching you how to: Develop skills needed to identify and demolish big-data myths Become an expert in separating hype from reality Understand the V’s that matter in healthcare and why Harmonize the 4 C’s across little and big data Choose data fi delity over data quality Learn how to apply the NRF Framework Master applied machine learning for healthcare Conduct a guided tour of learning algorithms Recognize and be prepared for the future of artificial intelligence in healthcare via best practices, feedback loops, and contextually intelligent agents (CIAs) The variety of data in healthcare spans multiple business workflows, formats (structured, un-, and semi-structured), integration at point of care/need, and integration with existing knowledge. In order to deal with these realities, the authors propose new approaches to creating a knowledge-driven learning organization-based on new and existing strategies, methods and technologies. This book will address the long-standing challenges in healthcare informatics and provide pragmatic recommendations on how to deal with them.
A Better Way For Doctors & Patients Are you a doctor who wants to give patients the best care, yet struggle with the demands of managing the clinic and the business? Or are you a patient who's tired of poor service, impolite greetings, and providers in a rush? Doctors Jeff and Susan Kegarise are here to give you hope. There is a better way--for both patients and doctors. In One Patient At A Time, they open the doors to their Nashville practice to let patients see how leadership, systems, staff, and doctors combine to deliver patient-focused, relationship-driven care. And they show doctors how to provide this kind of care by giving specific, implementable steps that drive a culture of service to patients--one that patients clearly see as unique, enjoyable, and a better experience than the typical doctor visit. Read this book and you will never look at your healthcare experience or your practice the same. And you will be better for it.
A proven working model of healthcare IT as a transformative clinical and business engine—from one of the world’s leading healthcare organizations Exciting new technology is revolutionizing healthcare in the twenty-first century. This visionary guide by Cleveland Clinic’s esteemed CIO shows you how to design, implement, and maximize your organization’s IT systems to deliver fully integrated, coordinated, high-quality care. You’ll learn how to: • Collaborate with patients: Track and monitor patients’ progress and communicate with them any time, anywhere. • Coordinate multiple caregivers and care teams: Build a network of communication among healthcare professionals across disciplines in different locations who are working on a single patient case; and integrate various IT systems into a fully functioning network. • Optimize electronic medical records: Quickly pull up and share patient histories, test results, and other essential data to provide timely care; and expand real-time access to clinical data and research. • Use IT for competitive advantage: Enable live chats, virtual visits, and online second opinions; create a content-rich, user-friendly website; build a social media strategy that engages patients and caregivers alike. Using the latest advancements in IT, you’ll be able to access and apply a wide range of online tools and field-tested strategies to any organization. Go behind the scenes at Clinic Cleveland to see how caregivers executed their IT strategy in a working environment—and how patients benefitted as a result. You’ll find simple but powerful ways to expand your IT network and provide personal, one-on-one care to all of your patients, anywhere in the world. By connecting your patients with caregivers—and caregivers with each other—you’ll be better equipped to diagnose conditions, recommend treatments, and monitor patients in ways that weren’t even possible 10 years ago. And you’ll see a vision of where IT is headed in the Internet of Healthcare. This is the future of healthcare. It’s on your computer, your phone, your tablet, your network, and the world wide web. It’s the IT advantage that makes organizations like Cleveland Clinic so successful—and patients healthier and happier. It’s about time. IT’s About Patient Care.
The evidence is undeniable. By any measure, the US spends more on healthcare than any other country in the world, yet its health outcomes as measure by longevity are in the bottom half among developed countries, and its health-related quality of life has remained constant or declined since 1998. In addition to high costs and lower than expected outcomes, the healthcare delivery system is plagues by treatment delays as it can take weeks to see a specialist, and many people have limited or no access to care. Part of the challenge is that the healthcare delivery system is a large, complex, and sophisticated value creation chain. Successfully changing this highly interconnected system is difficult and time consuming because the underlying problems are hard to comprehend, the root causes are many, the solution is unclear, and the relationships among problems, causes, and solution are multifaceted. To address these issues, the book carefully explains the underlying problems, examines their root causes using information, data, and logic, and presents a comprehensive and integrated solution that addresses these causes. These three steps are the methodological backbone of this book. A solution depends on understanding and applying the principles of patient-centered care (PCC) and resource management. PCC puts patients, supported by their primary care physicians, back in the role as decision makers and depends on patients being responsible for their health including making good life-style choices. After all, the best way to reduce healthcare costs and increase quality of life is to improve our health and wellness and as a result need less care. In addition, health insurance must be rethought and redesigned so it is less likely to lead to overuse. For many people with health insurance, the out-of-pocket cost of healthcare are small, so healthcare decision making is often biased toward consumption. Effective resource management means that healthcare providers must do a better job of acquiring and using resources in order to provide care quickly, productively, and correctly. This means improving healthcare strategy and management, accelerating the use of information technology, making drug costs affordable and fair, reducing the incidence of malpractice, and rebuilding the provider network. In addition, implementation is difficult because there are many participants in the healthcare delivery value chain, such as physicians, nurses, and medical technicians, as well as many provider organizations, such as hospitals, clinics, physician offices, and labs. Further up the value chain there are pharmaceutical companies, equipment providers, and other suppliers. These participants have diverse and sometimes conflicting goals, but each must be willing to accept change and work in a coordinated manner to improve healthcare. To overcome these problems, strong national leadership is needed to get the attention and support from the people and organizations involved in healthcare and to make the comprehensive changes that will lower healthcare costs, improve healthcare quality, eliminate delays, increase access, and enhance patient satisfaction.
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.
