James Weinstein, DO, president and CEO of Dartmouth-Hitchcock health system in Lebanon, N.H., has released a new book that discusses healthcare challenges and how to overcome them, The Portsmouth Herald reports.
The book, "Unraveled, Prescriptions to Repair a Broken Health Care System," was written by Dr. Weinstein and William B. Weeks, MD, PhD.
The book outlines healthcare challenges through various vignettes, stories of real people dealing with their illnesses, the ways their treatment may have been flawed, and Dr. Weinstein's offerings of how it can be improved, according to the report.
Dr. Weinstein said he has multiple views of healthcare, as a successful spine surgeon, as a person in charge of running a major medical center and as a father who lost a child to cancer.
"Seeing this system through the eyes of a parent of a very vulnerable child opened my eyes to so much that I had never seen as a healthcare provider," Dr. Weinstein wrote in the book's introduction, according to the report. "As the treatments began, we realized how much healthcare including healthcare decisions would be out of our control."
Overall, The Portsmouth Herald reports, the book tries to look at the whole patient experience, from the initial appointment through the final billing process.
Dr. Weinstein said the model of healthcare today is not sustainable, and he wants to help create a system that will be sustainable, according to the report.
"We need to look at everything and create a 20- to 30-year plan," Dr. Weinstein said, according to the report. "The system is not going to change overnight but with incremental changes in how we do things, we will create a better healthcare system. If we try to change it all at once, we will fail."
Specifically, he said, having the physician and the patient work together to keep patients in good health will reduce costs, according to the report. He also discusses unnecessary medical tests in the book.
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