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An Entrepreneur's Guide to Fixing Health Care
Portfolio (Hardcover)
May 2014
On Sale: May 15, 2014
240 pages ISBN: 1591846773 EAN: 9781591846772 Kindle: B00G3L6LXU Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction
A bold new remedy for the sprawling and wasteful health care
industry Where else but the doctor’s office do you have to fill out a
form on a clipboard? Have you noticed that hospital bills
are almost unintelligible, except for the absurdly high
dollar amount? Why is it that technology in other industries
drives prices down, but in health care it’s the reverse? And
why, in health care, is the customer so often treated as a
mere bystander—and an ignorant one at that? The same American medical establishment that saves lives and
performs wondrous miracles is also a $2.7 trillion industry
in deep dysfunction. And now, with the Affordable Care Act
(Obamacare), it is called on to extend full benefits to tens
of millions of newly insured. You might think that this
would leave us with a bleak choice— either to devote more of
our national budget to health care or to make do with less
of it. But there’s another path. In this provocative book, Jonathan Bush, cofounder and CEO
of athenahealth, calls for a revolution in health care to
give customers more choices, freedom, power, and
information, and at far lower prices. With humor and a
tell-it-likeit- is style, he picks up insights and ideas
from his days as an ambulance driver in New Orleans, an army
medic, and an entrepreneur launching a birthing start-up in
San Diego. In struggling to save that dying business, Bush’s
team created a software program that eventually became
athenahealth, a cloud-based services company that handles
electronic medical records, billing, and patient
communications for more than fifty thousand medical
providers nationwide. Bush calls for disruption of the status quo through new
business models, new payment models, and new technologies
that give patients more control of their care and enhance
the physicianpatient experience. He shows how this is
already happening. From birthing centers in Florida to
urgent care centers in West Virginia, upstarts are
disrupting health care by focusing on efficiency,
innovation, and customer service. Bush offers a vision and
plan for change while bringing a breakthrough perspective to
the debates surrounding Obamacare. You’ll learn how:
• Well-intended government regulations prop up overpriced
incumbents and slow the pace of innovation.
• Focused, profit-driven disrupters are chipping away at the
dominance of hospitals by offering routine procedures at
lower cost.
• Scrappy digital start-ups are equipping providers and
patients with new apps and technologies to access medical
data and take control of care.
• Making informed choices about the care we receive and pay
for will enable a more humane and satisfying health care
system to emerge. Bush’s plan calls for Americans not only to demand more from
providers but also to accept more responsibility for our
health, to weigh risks and make hard choices—in short, to
take back control of an industry that is central to our
lives and our economy.
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