Quality Care, Affordable Care: How Physicians Can Reduce Variation and Lower Healthcare Costs
Paperback
Now that health insurance reform has been passed and upheld by the Supreme Court, the real job of reducing the cost of healthcare needs to begin. But reducing healthcare costs is an extremely difficult job, one which requires out-of-the-box thinking to succeed. Fortunately, reducing variation in healthcare delivery offers a great deal of promise while giving doctors the say they deserve in making changes to healthcare workflow.
In this book, Lawrence Shapiro, MD, explains how by using the simple but potent variation-reduction process, physicians can take charge of healthcare reform to improve health and reduce the cost of care. And he tells the real-life story of how the variation reduction program at the Palo Alto Medical Foundation, which he runs, saved $31 million by instituting a series of specialty-oriented variation-reduction programs. He also shares the five pillars of a successful variation-reduction program, and explains how providers can use these approaches to build their own in-house variation reduction effort.
Don't miss this opportunity to understand and implement an approach to healthcare change which puts doctors in the driver s seat. This book offers a practical, hands-on guide to getting a variation-reduction program in place that physicians will sign up for. It offers a unique take from a physician leader who has personally led a highly-successful program and explains in plain language how to take advantage of his experience.
Lawrence Shapiro, MD, is a board-certified physician with a specialty in pulmonary medicine. For the last twenty years, he has been enmeshed in the healthcare system known as Managed Care. As a result of these experiences with physicians, medical groups, hospitals and health plans, he initiated the Variation Reduction Process at the Palo Alto Medical Foundation, which has reduced the cost of healthcare while increasing quality.