Showing titles in Policy & Administration

In Being Mortal, best-selling author Atul Gawande tackles the hardest challenge of his profession: how medicine can not only improve life but also the process of its ending. Medicine has triumphed in modern times, transforming birth, injury, and infectious disease from harrowing to manageable. But in the inevitable condition of aging and death, the goals of medicine seem too frequently to run counter to the interest of the human spirit.

Author Cory Franklin, MD, who headed the hospital's intensive care unit from the 1970s through the 1990s, shares his most unique and bizarre experiences, including the deadly Chicago heatwave of 1995, treating the first AIDS patients in the country before the disease was diagnosed, the nurse with rare Munchausen syndrome, the only surviving ricin victim, and the professor with Alzheimer's hiding the effects of the wrong medication.

In Unavoidably Unsafe, Dr. Edward Geehr and Dr. Jeffrey Barke confront the prevailing beliefs surrounding childhood vaccines with unflinching scrutiny and bold insight. As seasoned physicians, they acknowledge the revered status vaccines hold in modern medicine while bravely questioning their safety and efficacy.

Embark on a journey into the intricate world of medical billing and coding with "Medical Billing Essentials: A Beginner's Guide." This comprehensive book provides a step-by-step approach to mastering the fundamentals of healthcare finance, catering to beginners and seasoned professionals alike. Whether you're a student taking your first steps into the healthcare industry or a seasoned healthcare professional looking to broaden your skill set, this guide offers a solid foundation in medical billing and coding principles.

Catching cancer early remains the single best way to combat a disease that is the second-leading killer in both the US and worldwide. But the vast majority of resources in the fight against cancer are devoted to relatively ineffective late stage treatments. Early Detection examines this important anomaly in an accessible and expertly researched survey.

After Hurricane Katrina struck and power failed, amid rising floodwaters and heat, exhausted staff at Memorial Medical Center designated certain patients last for rescue. Months later, a doctor and two nurses were arrested and accused of injecting some of those patients with life-ending drugs.

We live in a world of great and increasing complexity, where even the most expert professionals struggle to master the tasks they face. Longer training, ever more advanced technologies - neither seems to prevent grievous errors. But in a hopeful turn, acclaimed surgeon and writer Atul Gawande finds a remedy in the humblest and simplest of techniques: the checklist.

Fact: Every chiropractor wants a busy, thriving practice where we’re helping lots of people, having tons of fun, and making a good living. Fact: Failures are common in private chiropractic practices. Fact: Most doctors will never realize their dreams because they never get the training or mentoring they need to break into success. This book changes that.

Considered the definitive history of the American healthcare system, The Social Transformation of American Medicine examines how the roles of doctors, hospitals, health plans, and government programs have evolved over the last two and a half centuries. Updated with a new preface and an epilogue analyzing developments since the early 1980s, this new edition is a must-listen for anyone concerned about the future of our fraught healthcare system.

The Study Guide is your go-to resource for conquering the Pharmacy Technician Certification Board (PTCB) Exam with confidence. Meticulously crafted by expertise, this comprehensive guide is tailored to assist aspiring pharmacy technicians in mastering the essential concepts and skills required to pass the exam. Here's what makes this guide stand out:

San Francisco's Laguna Honda Hospital is the last almshouse in the country, a descendant of the Hôtel-Dieu (God's hotel) that cared for the sick in the Middle Ages. Ballet dancers and rock musicians, professors and thieves - "anyone who had fallen, or, often, leapt, onto hard times" and needed extended medical care - ended up here. So did Victoria Sweet, who came for two months and stayed for 20 years. Laguna Honda, lower-tech but human-paced, gave Sweet the opportunity to practice a kind of attentive medicine that has almost vanished.

Bringing his audacious and persuasive thesis to life, Gartner offers case histories of some famous Americans who represent this phenomenon of hypomania. These are the real stories you never learned in school about some of those men who made America: Columbus, who discovered the continent, thought he was the messiah. John Winthrop, who settled and defined it, believed Americans were God's new chosen people. Alexander Hamilton, the indispensable founder who envisioned America's economic future, self-destructed because of pride and impulsive behavior.

In 2007, David Goldhill’s father died from infections acquired in a hospital - one of more than two hundred thousand avoidable deaths per year caused by medical error. The bill was enormous - and Medicare paid it. These circumstances left Goldhill angry and determined to understand how world-class technology and personnel could coexist with such carelessness - and how a business that failed so miserably could be paid in full.

It’s finally here–a thorough exploration of the transformative potential of artificial intelligence (AI) in the healthcare industry that is detailed, succinct, and easy to listen to! There’s no denying the power of artificial intelligence. When taught, programmed, and incorporated correctly, it’s nothing short of a modern miracle. And, thanks to recent technological advancements, it’s now a widely accessible modern miracle.

Medicine has become inhuman, to disastrous effect. The doctor-patient relationship - the heart of medicine - is broken: doctors are too distracted and overwhelmed to truly connect with their patients, and medical errors and misdiagnoses abound. In Deep Medicine, leading physician Eric Topol reveals how artificial intelligence can help. AI has the potential to transform everything doctors do, from notetaking and medical scans to diagnosis and treatment, greatly cutting down the cost of medicine and reducing human mortality.

For those who could read between the lines, the censored news out of China was terrifying. But the president insisted there was nothing to worry about. Fortunately, we are still a nation of skeptics. Fortunately, there are those among us who study pandemics and are willing to look unflinchingly at worst-case scenarios. Michael Lewis’ taut and brilliant nonfiction thriller pits a band of medical visionaries against the wall of ignorance that was the official response of the Trump administration to the outbreak of COVID-19.

A scientific and medical revolution has crept up on us, based on study after study, from hundreds of laboratories around the world. It is no longer just a theoretical shift: every one of us will be touched by it, and many of us already have been. The meaning of disease, our understanding of the human body, and crucial decisions about what we all need to know and what choices we make about our health are at stake. Welcome to the new world of personalized medicine.

Our industry has always dealt with change. But the environment we re navigating now requires change at a whole different level. We ve moved from experiencing episodic change to continuous change and as John Kotter has famously noted, that requires a whole different set of skills and a whole different level of urgency. In his new book, thought leader Quint Studer explains how to leverage the powerful values that have always defined healthcare people passion, fortitude, willingness to learn to meet the challenges of our disruptive external environment.

Pathologies of Power uses harrowing stories of life - and death - in extreme situations to interrogate our understanding of human rights. Paul Farmer argues that promoting the social and economic rights of the world's poor is the most important human rights struggle of our times. With passionate eyewitness accounts from the prisons of Russia and the beleaguered villages of Haiti and Chiapas, this book links the lived experiences of individual victims to a broader analysis of structural violence.

Growing up in a New Jersey factory town in the 1980s, Daisy Hernández believed that her aunt had become deathly ill from eating an apple. No one in her family, in either the United States or Colombia, spoke of infectious diseases, and even into her 30s, she only knew that her aunt had died of a rare illness called Chagas. But as Hernández dug deeper, she discovered that Chagas - or the kissing bug disease - is more prevalent in the United States than the Zika virus.