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At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade’s training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, the next he was a patient struggling to live.When Breath Becomes Air chronicles Kalanithi’s transformation from a medical student asking what makes a virtuous and meaningful life into a neurosurgeon working in the core of human identity – the brain – and finally into a patient and a new father.

DELIVER FASTER, BETTER, AND CHEAPER HEALTHCARE IN AS FEW AS FIVE DAYSA Doody's Core Title for 2015!"The main purpose is to present simple steps to help hospitals start getting faster, better, and cheaper in five days or less while achieving the goal of fast, affordable, and flawless healthcare. Healthcare has many opportunities for improvement and the use of Lean Six Sigma concepts can make a dramatic impact. This book provides the basic information to do that."--Doody's Review ServiceLean Six Sigma for Hospitals: Simple Steps to Fast, Affordable, Flawless Healthcare explains how to use tested Lean Six Sigma methods and tools to rapidly improve hospital operations and quality of care and reduce costs. These proven strategies follow the patient from the front door of the hospital or emergency room all the way through discharge, examining key aspects of patient flow and quality. The trail of billing and collections is also followed to discover and eliminate cash flow leaks. This practical guide emphasizes both the clinical and operational sides to reduce the "three demons of quality"--delay, defects, and deviation. Real-world case studies from major hospitals illustrate successful implementations of Lean Six Sigma.Coverage Includes: Achieving a faster, better hospital in five days--emergency department, door-to-balloon time, operating room, medical imaging, lab, nursing unit, clinical staff, pharmacy, order accuracy, diagnosis, ICU Lean for accelerated patient flow Reducing medical errors with Six Sigma Creating a more profitable hospital in five days by reducing denied, rejected, and appealed claims Six Sigma for hospitals Excel power tools for Lean Six Sigma Identifying improvement projects through data mining and analysis Sustaining improvement using control charts Laser-focused process innovation Statistical tools for Lean Six Sigma Implementing Lean Six Sigma

PROVEN STRATEGIES FOR REVOLUTIONIZING HEALTHCARE SYSTEMS "If I had to sum up this book in one word, the word would be 'brilliant'! This is one of the most insightful books on TOC, not just for healthcare, that I have ever read."--BOB SPROULL, author of The Ultimate Improvement Cycle: Maximizing Profits through the Integration of Lean, Six Sigma, and the Theory of ConstraintsPerformance Improvement for Healthcare: Leading Change with Lean, Six Sigma, and Constraints Management lays out an integrated approach for using three improvement methods that have proven to be the most effective way to transform hospital operations in terms of patient outcomes and experience, financial viability, and employee satisfaction. This pioneering guide presents a strategy for managing bottlenecks, eliminating waste, reducing errors, and containing costs in healthcare organizations, as well as sustaining the gains achieved. Real-world case studies illustrate successful performance improvement implementations that have realized breakthrough operational and financial results in the U.S. and abroad.The book is an in-depth guide for healthcare leaders and includes topics such as:Assessing your organization's readiness for adopting a best-of-breed performance improvement strategy How to deploy an integrated performance improvement program and get far better results than with traditional methods Using Constraints Management to identify leverage points and break constraints that exist in all healthcare organizations Building a program that consistently meets milestones on time and on budget How to begin thinking at the system-level of complex healthcare organizations and target high-impact opportunities Preventing common issues with sustaining improvement initiatives

The New York Times Science Bestseller from Robert Wachter, Modern Healthcare’s #1 Most Influential Physician-Executive in the USWhile 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.

One of America's top doctors reveals how AI will empower physicians and revolutionize patient care 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. By freeing physicians from the tasks that interfere with human connection, AI will create space for the real healing that takes place between a doctor who can listen and a patient who needs to be heard. Innovative, provocative, and hopeful, Deep Medicine shows us how the awesome power of AI can make medicine better, for all the humans involved. Illustrations note: 46 Halftones, black & white 11 Tables, black & white

#1 New York Times BestsellerIn Being Mortal, bestselling author Atul Gawande tackles the hardest challenge of his profession: how medicine can not only improve life but also the process of its endingMedicine 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. Nursing homes, preoccupied with safety, pin patients into railed beds and wheelchairs. Hospitals isolate the dying, checking for vital signs long after the goals of cure have become moot. Doctors, committed to extending life, continue to carry out devastating procedures that in the end extend suffering.Gawande, a practicing surgeon, addresses his profession's ultimate limitation, arguing that quality of life is the desired goal for patients and families. Gawande offers examples of freer, more socially fulfilling models for assisting the infirm and dependent elderly, and he explores the varieties of hospice care to demonstrate that a person's last weeks or months may be rich and dignified.Full of eye-opening research and riveting storytelling, Being Mortal asserts that medicine can comfort and enhance our experience even to the end, providing not only a good life but also a good end.