Vivian S. Lee, MD, PhD, MBA
Executive Fellow, Harvard Business School
Former President, Verily Health Platforms (Alphabet)
Author, The Long Fix: Solving America's Health Care Crisis with Strategies that Work for Everyone
So much of health care is overly complicated and difficult to navigate, for patients and also, surprising to most, to many clinicians. Liao, Staloff, and Joo lean into this challenge and their book, Reshaping Health Systems offers a fresh, clear, and relatable explanation for why US healthcare works the way it does, and how to make it better. With practical case studies that most people will find familiar, the authors bring their real-world experiences and expertise to answer questions you always had but were afraid to ask.
There are no panaceas in health policy or care delivery. Better care will come through dedicated effort from many individuals and groups across many policy and practice domains. This book acknowledges and serves as a resource for this reality. It should be essential reading for anyone who wants to understand and improve the health care system.
Christopher Moriates, MD
Executive Director, Costs of Care
Author, Understanding Value-Based Healthcare
If you want to be a good clinician in the modern health care system, it is no longer enough to know which medications to prescribe or tests to order; you must also know how to help patients navigate complicated systems of care to promote their health. If you want to be a great clinician, you also need skills to improve those systems of care. This book masterfully covers both knowledge and skills, buoying complex concepts by constantly tying them to the experiences of a patient and a clinician. If every health professional reads this book, care in the United States would immeasurably improve.
Testimonials
About the Book
This book was a labor of love. As practicing clinicians, we were driven to write it by our different experiences with health systems leadership, research, policy, and education. Our intention was to design a book that would be useful to clinicians and trainees at all levels; relevant for self-study or structured curricular teaching; and consumable whether read cover to cover, or as needed for reference in practice or educational settings.
Given our collective experiences, achieving these goals was high priority for several reasons. First, health systems topics are excluded from much of medical education, creating an overall dearth of useful resources. Second, existing resources are often fragmented across different disciplines. In particular, some health systems-relevant knowledge is found in the quality improvement literature while other types are found in policy, operational, or implementation literature. Clinicians and trainees are faced with a challenging task: to piece together information on their own from disparate disciplines and fields into useful, applied knowledge. Third, the few available resources framed explicitly on health systems are often theory-driven and conceptual, far from the real-world and lived experiences of clinicians and trainees. A practical, unified health systems resource was needed.
We chose the case-based format intentionally to mirror the way clinicians train, think, and work. The goal was to frame the content in a structure that is intuitive, enjoyable, and accessible, connecting the often complex and hidden factors driving health care to the real- world clinical experiences that result from them.
No resource is comprehensive, and every book requires trade-offs. Entire volumes could be dedicated to a number of systems factors or solutions; our book omits certain details for space and usability. Some topics are also poised to change and evolve after the writing of this book.
This book was a labor of love and a product of experience. May that experience inform yours, illuminating factors driving health care and offering ways to improve it.
Joshua M. Liao
Internal medicine physician and international policy and practice redesign expert
Jonathan A. Staloff
Joseph H. Joo
Family medicine physician and leader focused on population health management
Internal medicine physician and leading policy scholar and evaluation leader
"Using a case-based format that mirrors real-world scenarios involving patients and clinicians, Drs. Liao, Staloff, and Joo impart foundational health systems knowledge and skills in ways that are intuitive, enjoyable, and accessible for clinicians and health system leaders alike."