Healthcare's Path Forward: How Ongoing Crises Are Creating New Standards for Excellence

From the author of The Epidemic of Empathy in Healthcare and The Good Doctor comes a book that explores how the pandemic and other crises revealed what excellence in healthcare truly means and presents an action plan to achieve it.

The goal of healthcare has always been to reduce suffering, but three perfect storms of recent years―the health storm produced by the Covid-19 pandemic; the economic storm that resulted from its disruptions; and the social storm that followed the murder of George Floyd, which sparked fresh outrage at longstanding inequities―have sharpened and added important nuances to our understanding of what that means. In Healthcare’s Path Forward, Thomas Lee explores how the work of healthcare is being transformed by a deeper knowledge of what suffering means for patients, their families, and healthcare providers themselves. To respond, healthcare organizations must:

• deserve, earn, and build the trust of patients
• deserve, earn, and build the trust of the healthcare workforce
• build a resilient, high reliability culture with a broadened concept of safety
• build an inclusive culture that treats every patient and every employee with respect
• extend patient-centeredness to embrace consumerism, and work relentlessly to remove friction from the patient experience
• respond to the imperatives of the new marketplace for high-value care focused on long-term outcomes

Lee uses data to demonstrate trends and insights into how health systems can thrive, offers examples of organizations making major advancements, and provides specific, practical recommendations for healthcare leaders, clinicians, and other caregivers. This book is a thoughtful, impassioned call to work toward excellence and forge healthcare’s path forward―together.

Thomas H. Lee, MD, Chief Medical Officer of Press Ganey, brings more than three decades of experience in healthcare performance improvement as a practicing physician, leader in provider organizations, researcher, and health policy expert. He’s responsible for developing clinical and operational strategies to help providers across the nation measure and improve the patient experience, with an overarching goal of reducing the suffering of patients as they undergo care and improve the value of that care. Lee is the Editor-in-Chief and Editorial Board Co-Chair of the New England Journal of Medicine Catalyst. An internist and cardiologist, he also practices primary care at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. He is the author of The Epidemic of Empathy in Healthcare and The Good Doctor.