The Digital Doctor Hope Hype And Harm At The Dawn Of Medicine S Computer Age

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.

The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated burnout for clinicians and administrators alike, heightening the need for this practical guide that provides a comprehensive approach to empowering physicians while ensuring organizational resilience. In this second edition of Preventing Physician Burnout: Curing the Chaos and Returning Joy to the Practice of Medicine, doctors Paul DeChant and Diane Shannon define burnout, explore the consequences for physicians, patients, and the health care system, identify the underlying causes that are fueling the burnout epidemic, and provide case studies with specific interventions that have demonstrated success in healing the broken clinical workplace.Based on their experience and extensive interviews with experts in burnout, health care, and Lean management, they give voice to patient advocates, burnout researchers, leaders of health care organizations, and the physicians themselves. DeChant and Shannon also share examples of strategies that hospitals and physician practices across the United States are using to address the root causes of burnout among physicians, including action items for preventing burnout and curbing the crisis."It is hard to see how we can create the health care system we want and need on the backs of joyless and unengaged doctors. This well-written, practical book offers the prescription we need to address this crisis." Robert Wachter, MD, author of The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine's Computer Age

Prescribing Mental Health Medication is a text for nursing and medical practitioners who are learning how to diagnose and treat mental disorders with medication. Skills-based, it focuses on the following key issues: how to start and stop medication how to dose when to change medication dealing with particular kinds of patients specific illnesses and their medication special populations and conditions the management of side effects practical issues such as monitoring medication with blood levels administrative issues such as record-keeping. Special icons used throughout the text highlight clinical tips, advice on how to talk to patients and differences in practice in primary care settings. Based on the author's considerable experience of training nursing and medical staff, Prescribing Mental Health Medication presents complex topics in an organized, logical and easily assimilated format. It provides a supportive text for those new to prescribing and a comprehensive source of reference for more experienced practitioners or teachers.

Book Overview1. Entrepreneurs and Startups2. Doctors, Nurses, and Health Professionals3. Pharma, Biotech, Device Companies4. Patients and Consumers5. Employers, Insurers, Regulators6. Gadgets, Apps, Technology7. Behavior, Design, and Translation8. Big Data, Measurement, and Metrics9. VCs and Other Investors10. Innovation---Health matters.“When you have your health, you have everything,” wrote memoirist Augusten Burroughs. “When you do not have your health, nothing else matters at all.”Health can also be very expensive, and reducing costs isn't easy, since as Stanford health policy expert Victor Fuchs famously observed, “Every dollar of waste is income to some individual or organization.”One key challenge healthcare faces today is figuring out how to maintain health and deliver better care for patients while somehow keeping in check the overall costs associated with these activities.The good news is that there is now the massive potential for healthcare transformation. Data-driven analysis has called into question many traditional healthcare assumptions, and permits us to view the challenges in a fresh light. For instance, there seems to be little correlation between healthcare cost and quality—and great care can be delivered at lower cost if we can improve the alignment of incentives among patients, payers, and providers.Key drivers of healthcare change are the intense economic pressure of healthcare costs, the impact—to be determined—associated with the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, and the advent of inexpensive and widely accessible technologies; together these have created a platform for industry transformation the likes of which has not been seen since the dawn of modern surgery.And it's about time. Technology has been used to optimize and redefine virtually every key industry except healthcare. Manufacturing has gone from human assembly lines to robotics; banking has gone from tellers to home banking; travel has gone from agents with brochures to Travelocity; and yet the practice of medicine, in many ways, hasn't changed in decades.Many of today's most passionate entrepreneurs are trying to bring the dazzle and real promise of technology innovation to the challenges of healthcare, resulting in an explosion of companies focused on everything from wearable sensors and weight-loss apps to big data analytics and GPS-tagged hospital equipment—the “internet of things.”These emerging tools and promising technologies—which collectively comprise “digital health”—offer a promising path forward, and entrepreneurs and innovators are forging forward seeking to make a real difference in a field which we all need but which is sorely in need of its own tender loving care if it is to flourish in tomorrow's world.As Hippocrates once said, “Healing is a matter of time, but it is sometimes also a matter of opportunity.” And technology—if judiciously applied—may be just the tonic to help reinvigorate the health of our healthcare industry.The key challenge faced by would-be disruptive technologists is not only recognizing potentially useful analogs from other industries, but also understanding the ways in which health remains fundamentally different.Amid the clamor to disrupt healthcare, we should also take care to preserve and augment what may be right about medicine—the doctor/patient relationship for example, or the drive of inquisitive physicians, especially within academic centers, to continuously push and challenge the limits of what is known and what is possible.In Tech Tonics—a distillation of our writing and thinking over the last several years—we introduce the reader to the fascinating digital health space, including a ground-level view of the landscape, the structural challenges, the players, and the progress.

New York Times Bestseller “Every once in a while a book comes along that rocks the foundations of an established order that's seriously in need of being shaken. The modern American hospital is that establishment and Unaccountable is that book.”-Shannon Brownlee, author of Overtreated Dr. Marty Makary is co-developer of the life-saving checklist outlined in Atul Gawande's bestselling The Checklist Manifesto. As a busy surgeon who has worked in many of the best hospitals in the nation, he can testify to the amazing power of modern medicine to cure. But he's also been a witness to a medical culture that routinely leaves surgical sponges inside patients, amputates the wrong limbs, and overdoses children because of sloppy handwriting. Over the last ten years, neither error rates nor costs have come down, despite scientific progress and efforts to curb expenses. Why? To patients, the healthcare system is a black box. Doctors and hospitals are unaccountable, and the lack of transparency leaves both bad doctors and systemic flaws unchecked. Patients need to know more of what healthcare workers know, so they can make informed choices. Accountability in healthcare would expose dangerous doctors, reward good performance, and force positive change nationally, using the power of the free market. Unaccountable is a powerful, no-nonsense, non-partisan diagnosis for healing our hospitals and reforming our broken healthcare system.

Complete coverage of the core principles of patient safety Understanding Patient Safety, 2e is the essential text for anyone wishing to learn the key clinical, organizational, and systems issues in patient safety.The book is filled with valuable cases and analyses, as well as up-to-date tables, graphics, references, and tools -- all designed to introduce the patient safety field to medical trainees, and be the go-to book for experienced clinicians and non-clinicians alike. Features NEW chapter on the critically important role of checklists in medical practice NEW case examples throughout Expanded coverage of the role of computers in patient safety and outcomes Expanded coverage of new patient initiatives from the Joint Commission

What if your cell phone could detect cancer cells circulating in your blood or warn you of an imminent heart attack? Mobile wireless digital devices, including smartphones and tablets with seemingly limitless functionality, have brought about radical changes in our lives, providing hyper-connectivity to social networks and cloud computing. But the digital world has hardly pierced the medical cocoon. Until now. Beyond reading email and surfing the Web, we will soon be checking our vital signs on our phone. We can already continuously monitor our heart rhythm, blood glucose levels, and brain waves while we sleep. Miniature ultrasound imaging devices are replacing the icon of medicine--the stethoscope. DNA sequencing, Facebook, and the Watson supercomputer have already saved lives. For the first time we can capture all the relevant data from each individual to enable precision therapy, prevent major side effects of medications, and ultimately to prevent many diseases from ever occurring. And yet many of these digital medical innovations lie unused because of the medical community's profound resistance to change. In The Creative Destruction of Medicine, Eric Topol--one of the nation's top physicians and a leading voice on the digital revolution in medicine--argues that radical innovation and a true democratization of medical care are within reach, but only if we consumers demand it. We can force medicine to undergo its biggest shakeup in history. This book shows us the stakes--and how to win them.

A succinct and practical primer on healthcare transformation, Leading Healthcare Transformation is a key resource for all clinicians in leadership positions. It summarizes high-profile healthcare topics and includes a synopsis of the evidence, examples, lessons learned, and key action steps for each topic covered.Providing cutting-edge insights fro