Understanding Health Policy: A Clinical Approach, Seventh Edition / Edition 7

by Thomas S. Bodenheimer, Kevin Grumbach

Overview

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Understand how the healthcare system works – and how you can succeed in it

A Doody's Core Title for 2019!

The Seventh Edition of Understanding Health Policy: A Clinical Approach remains the most trusted and comprehensive guide to healthcare available and provides everything you need to build a solid foundation on the field’s most critical issues. This concise and engaging textbook clearly explains the all major aspects of healthcare, including finance, organization, and reimbursement. It will help you develop a clearer, more systematic way of thinking about health care in the United States, its problems, and the alternatives for managing and solving these problems.

The book features a unique approach, using clinical vignettes to highlight key policy issues, clarify difficult concepts, and demonstrate how they apply to real-world situations, affecting both patients and professionals alike. Expert practitioners in both the public and private healthcare sectors, the authors cover the entire scope of our healthcare system. They carefully weave key principles, descriptions, and concrete examples into chapters that make important health policy issues interesting and understandable.

Understanding Health Policy makes otherwise difficult concepts easy to understand—so you can make better decisions, improve outcomes, and enact positive change on a daily basis.

The Seventh Edition features:

• Updated throughout to reflect the latest changes and events, including additional content on value-based care, Choosing Wisely®, etc.
• Expanded coverage of the impact of the Affordable Care Act, including Accountable Care Organizations and their impact, and global issues in health policy
• End-of-chapter summaries and comprehensive lists of review questions to reinforce what you have learned
• Includes "Questions and Discussion Topics" for classroom or individual study
  

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781259584756
Publisher:	McGraw-Hill Professional Publishing
Publication date:	02/29/2016
Edition description:	Older Edition
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	7.30(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Thomas Bodenheimer, MD (San Francisco, CA) is Professor of Family Medicine, University of California-San Francisco School of Medicine.
Kevin Grumbach, MD (San Francisco, CA) is Chair, Department of Family Medicine, University of California-San Francisco School of Medicine.

Table of Contents

Preface v

1 Introduction: The Paradox of Excess and Deprivation 1

2 Paying for Health Care 5

3 Access to Health Care 19

4 Paying Health Care Providers 33

5 How Health Care Is Organized-I: Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary Care 45

6 How Health Care Is Organized-II: Health Delivery Systems 61

7 The Health Care Workforce and the Education of Health Professionals 75

8 Painful Versus Painless Cost Control 93

9 Mechanisms for Controlling Costs 105

10 Quality of Health Care 117

11 Prevention of Illness 135

12 Long-Term 145

13 Medical Ethics and Rationing of Health Care 153

14 Health Care in Four Nations 169

15 Health Care Reform and National Health Insurance 185

16 Conflict and Change in America's Health Care System 197

17 Conclusion: Tensions and Challenges 209

18 Questions and Discussion Topics 213

Index 221

Editorial Reviews

Reviewer: Carole A. Kenner, PhD, RN, FAAN, FNAP, ANEF (The College of New Jersey)
Description: This is the seventh edition of a book that presents new information related to the Affordable Care Act and Accountable Care Organizations while illustrating the basics of health policy within the context of healthcare delivery. The previous edition was published in 2012.
Purpose: The purpose is to describe health policy using clinical cases to illustrate the key concepts such as healthcare organizations and delivery models, reimbursement, and healthcare finance.
Audience: The intended audience is medical, nursing, nurse practitioner, physician assistant, pharmacy, social work, and public health students, and others interested in public health including researchers and policy-makers.
Features: The book is divided into small sections, starting with the basics (who pays for healthcare and how, access to care, how healthcare systems are organized, the healthcare workforce and education of health professionals) and including changes over time, quality of care, health promotion, and, finally, complex topics such as rationing of care, healthcare reform, and the points of tension regarding health as a right and the move toward national health insurance. One shortcoming is the lack of information on the changes in nursing education at the doctoral level for nurse practitioners as well as the need for all healthcare professionals to have an understanding of population health in their basic education.
Assessment: There are many health policy books on the market, but this one has been around for many years. Its longevity is probably most notably related to the use of clinical cases to illustrate policy points. The new content and the summaries and review questions in each chapter are aimed at engaging learners and moves the pedagogy away from faculty-driven education. The use of tables and illustrations to show how, for example, traditional models of care are now patient-centered models really reinforce the content. Reviewing these illustrations helps learners to move easily through difficult and somewhat otherwise dry material.

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