Health Care Administration

Is your healthcare organization spending too much time on strategy—with too little to show for it? If you read (or listen to) nothing else on strategy, listen to these ten articles. We've combed through hundreds of Harvard Business Review articles and selected the most important ones for healthcare professionals to help you catalyze your organization's strategy development and execution.

Smokescreen: What the Marijuana Industry Doesn't Want You to Know examines the inside story behind the headlines, containing accounts from Sabet’s time in the Obama administration, to stunning revelations from whistleblowers speaking out for the first time. What it finds is how the marijuana industry is running rampant without proper oversight, leaving Americans’ health seriously at risk.

Dr. Oliver Sacks's books Awakenings, An Anthropologist on Mars and the best-selling The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat have been acclaimed for their compassion in the treatment of patients affected with profound disorders. In A Leg to Stand On, it is Sacks himself who is the patient: an encounter with a bull on a desolate mountain in Norway has left him with a severely damaged leg. But what should be a routine recuperation is actually the beginning of a strange medical journey.

The Coming Healthcare Revolution identifies and describes five top-down macro forces and five bottom-up market forces that have sufficient strength to transform the US healthcare industry from the outside-in. The powerful macro forces are demographic determinants, funding fatigue, chronic pandemics, technological imperatives, and pro-consumer/market reforms.

In Curable journalist and health care advocate Travis Christofferson looks at medicine through a magnifying glass and asks an important question: What if the roots of the current US health care crisis are psychological and systemic, perpetuated not just by corporate influence and the powers that be, but by you and me? Curable outlines the future of medicine, detailing brilliant examples of new health care systems that prove we can do better. It turns out we have more control over our health (and happiness) than we think.

Interweaving history, original reportage, and personal narrative, Pandemic explores the origin of epidemics, drawing parallels between the story of cholera - one of history's most disruptive and deadly pathogens - and the new pathogens that stalk humankind today, from Ebola and avian influenza to drug-resistant superbugs.

If the technical jargon around Medicare leaves you feeling dazed, it’s time for a simplified approach that will lead you to real understanding. Your search is over! Medicare… The mere mention of the word is enough to make you want to bury your head in the sand and think about literally anything else. How can such an important process be so confusing? If you feel anxious, stressed, and confused every time you start trying to figure out how Medicare works, you’re not alone. Indeed, many people give up without ever receiving all the advantages they’re entitled to.

Ezekiel J. Emanuel, a professor of medical ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania who also served as a special adviser to the White House on health-care reform, has written a brilliant diagnostic explanation of why health care in America has become such a divisive social issue, how money and medicine have their own American story, and why reform has bedeviled presidents of the left and right for more than one hundred years.

Few of us need convincing that the American health insurance system needs reform. But many of the existing proposals focus on expanding one relatively successful piece of the system or building in piecemeal additions. These proposals miss the point. As the Stanford health economist Liran Einav and the MIT economist and MacArthur Genius Amy Finkelstein argue, our health care system was never deliberately designed, but rather pieced together to deal with issues as they became politically relevant.

In the pursuit of possible links between childhood vaccines, intestinal inflammation, and neurologic injury in children, Wakefield lost his job in London’s Royal Free Hospital, his country of birth, his career, and his medical license. A recent General Medical Council ruling stated that he was “dishonest, irresponsible and showed callous disregard for the distress and pain of children.” Maligned by the medical establishment and mainstream media, Wakefield endeavors to set the record straight.

2020 will go down alongside 1914, 1929, and 1968 as one of the most consequential years in history. This riveting and affecting book is the first attempt to capture the full human experience of that fateful time. At the heart of 2020 are seven vivid profiles of ordinary New Yorkers—including an elementary school principal, a bar manager, a subway custodian, and a local political aide—whose experiences illuminate how Americans, and people across the globe, reckoned with 2020.

Teeth takes listeners on a disturbing journey into America's silent epidemic of oral disease, exposing the hidden connections between tooth decay and stunted job prospects, low educational achievement, social mobility, and the troubling state of our public health.

The acclaimed author of Carved in Sand - a veteran investigative journalist who endured persistent back pain for decades - delivers the definitive book on the subject: an essential examination of all facets of the back pain industry, exploring what works, what doesn't, what may cause harm, and how to get on the road to recovery. In her effort to manage her chronic back pain, investigative reporter Cathryn Jakobson Ramin spent years and a small fortune on a panoply of treatments.

Patients at Risk: The Rise of the Nurse Practitioner and Physician Assistant in Healthcare exposes a vast conspiracy of political maneuvering and corporate greed that has led to the replacement of qualified medical professionals by lesser trained practitioners. As corporations seek to save money and government agencies aim to increase constituent access, minimum qualifications for the guardians of our nation’s healthcare continue to decline - with deadly consequences.

Growing up in a New Jersey factory town in the 1980s, Daisy Hernández believed that her aunt had become deathly ill from eating an apple. No one in her family, in either the United States or Colombia, spoke of infectious diseases, and even into her 30s, she only knew that her aunt had died of a rare illness called Chagas. But as Hernández dug deeper, she discovered that Chagas - or the kissing bug disease - is more prevalent in the United States than the Zika virus.

The American health-care system is failing us. It is a frustratingly complex, opaque, and unaffordable system that results in suboptimal care and a deterioration of the welfare of the majority of American families. The experience of the past few decades and the recent ravaging pandemic has shown us that doing more of the same is not going to deliver us from this dilemma. But there is hope. There is a way to create a more accessible, consumer-friendly, safer, and affordable system of care for all of us.

Uwe Reinhardt was a towering figure and moral conscience of health care policy in the United States and beyond. Famously bipartisan, he advised presidents and Congress on health reform and originated central features of the Affordable Care Act. In Priced Out, Reinhardt offers an engaging and enlightening account of today's US health care system, explaining why it costs so much more and delivers so much less than the systems of every other advanced country, why this situation is morally indefensible, and how we might improve it.

A renowned cardiologist and Harvard professor spells out the future digital shift of medicine—and how it will impact the lives not only of patients and health care professionals but of all humans.

Dr. Caleb Slater has a revolutionarily new approach to treating patients. With a slightly different view of the human body, he has been able to achieve groundbreaking results for a wide variety of symptoms, including pain, nausea, dizziness, abdominal discomfort, headaches, and breathing difficulties to name a few. If you have found the current treatments lacking and only managing your symptoms rather than providing a cure, then this book is for you.

From medical expert Leana Wen, MD, Lifelines is an insider's account of public health and its crucial role - from opioid addiction to global pandemic - and an inspiring story of her journey from struggling immigrant to being one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People.