How Physicians Can Fix Health Care - by Chris Trimble (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

How Physicians Can Fix Health Care: One Innovation at a Time Professor Chris Trimble Dartmouth College Penicillin, wonder drug of the 1940s, delivered a dramatic double win. It improved medical outcomes and simultaneously slashed costs. Today's cheap and curative elixirs, however, are not pills. They come instead in the form of innovations in the way care is delivered. Fee-for-service medicine has stood as a formidable barrier to these innovations for decades. Now, thanks to the ongoing transition to value-based payments, there are tens of thousands of opportunities for dramatic double wins. They are found in every hospital, in every clinic and in every medical condition. Policymakers have done their part. The rest is up to innovators on the front lines. Innovators will emerge from every health profession. There will be little progress on the largest opportunities, however, without one essential ingredient: physician leadership. For years, many physicians have felt like mere captives in the game of fixing health care. Physicians are no longer pawns, they are prime movers. A groundswell of physician innovators, determined to rebuild care one step at a time, is exactly what the system needs. The innovations that have the greatest potential are of a certain minimum size. They are characterized by the creation of small multidisciplinary teams - a few people to a few dozen - that are dedicated full time to a single effort to redesign care from scratch for a particular patient population. They deploy providers in nontraditional ways. They sometimes invent entirely new roles and team structures for health care delivery. How Physicians Can Fix Health Care: One Innovation at a Time is the essential step-by-step guide for physician innovators, their teams and the senior leaders in their organizations. Chris Trimble has dedicated his career to studying innovation inside of established organizations. This is his sixth book.

Review Quotes

"A roadmap for physician-innovators ... this book simply could not be more timely." -- Patrick Brophy, MD, Co-Chief Executive Officer, University of Iowa Health System

"Trimble is spot on again. We need to challenge and liberate physician-innovators and their teams to tackle the toughest problems in health care, including the proverbial elephant, costs. Restoring the physician leadership model can help attract and retain top talent and truly transform health care for all." -- Vivian S. Lee, MD, Chief Executive Officer, University of Utah Health Care

"Trimble understands physicians ... the way we are feeling and the obstacles we are facing. This is a clear, practical, and engaging guide to making innovation happen. Trimble's work has been enormously helpful to me." --Eric Isselbacher, MD, Staff Cardiologist and Director of the Healthcare Transformation Lab, Massachusetts General Hospital