Health Administration

On May 3, 2006, Ted Giovanis emailed a US government official, seeking clarity on an arcane issue: the calculation used by Medicare to determine reimbursement rates for certain kinds of hospitals. Though he expected a routine exchange, what unfolded was anything but.

Infectious disease specialist Dr. John Froude has worked on four continents over nearly 50 years, treating sufferers of plagues that arose over a century ago and never left us (like malaria and cholera) and battling new threats (like AIDS and COVID-19) as they emerge. In Plagued, he offers a gripping and timely account of the pandemics that have driven our evolution and shaped our history. Blending science and narrative, Froude explores not only the unstoppable march of pestilence and its effects, but our intimate relationship with bacteria and viruses.

Unser Gesundheitssystem steht unter hohem Veränderungsdruck: Wir leben aufgrund bahnbrechender medizinischer Fortschritte immer länger, jedoch führt unser zunehmend ungesunder Lebensstil dazu, dass wir immer häufiger an chronischen Krankheiten leiden. Dies treibt die Kosten im Gesundheitswesen in die Höhe und bringt unser erfolgreiches System ins Wanken. Die Digitalisierung im Gesundheitswesen zu forcieren, ist ein möglicher Weg, den Kostensteigerungen zu begegnen und gleichzeitig Kranke besser zu versorgen.

In Unhealthy: Corruption and Malpractice in the American Health System, Dr. Richard Kradin, a professor at Harvard Medical School and expert in pulmonary infectious diseases, explores the history of the corporate and ideological transformation of America’s medical profession and how it has diminished the quality of health care. He describes how progressive medical education has produced a generation of physicians as concerned with political activism as they are with medical science.

For decades, researchers have chased a pharmaceutical cure for memory loss. But despite the fact that no disease-modifying biotech treatments have emerged, new research suggests that dementia rates have actually declined in the United States and Western Europe over the last decade. Why is this happening? And what does it mean for brain health in the future?

Why a book on health care? Our systems have long been broken, even before the Covid-19 pandemic hit. The great progress in medicine is just not affordable any longer. Widespread frustration prevails and finger pointing in a silo-mentality are dominating the public narrative on the matter. Why have we missed the train of digitalization and value-based principles in health care? Any other industry has long recognized that customer focus is the holy grail to success. But, in health care, why have we so terribly lost focus on our ultimate customer - the patient?