Prescription for the Future

May 15, 2017
Emanuel, an MD and PhD credited as an architect of Obamacare, examines successful health delivery systems across the country, including doctor's practices, multispecialty clinics, and hospitals, and highlights a dozen ideas he is convinced will dramatically improve the quality, lower the cost, and enhance the experience of medical care in America. These transformational methods include resourceful scheduling of patient appointments, efficient registration and rooming of patients, measuring the clinical performance of physicians, standardizing patient care with established treatment guidelines, adept management of chronic illnesses, deinstitutionalization of medical care (decreasing ER visits and hospital admissions), optimizing behavioral health interventions, improving palliative and home care, and promoting lifestyle changes (fitness and nutrition programs, fall-prevention for the elderly). Although it's steered toward physician-leaders, healthcare executives, and policy-makers and jammed with head-spinning jargon and acronyms, Emanuel's treatise is nonetheless instructive for everyone, especially because it is startling and troubling to see how economics dominates the discussion of medical care. In the current and future model of medicine as big business, will empathy and compassion be elbowed out by cost-cutting and efficiency?(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)