On Point Live! With Atul Gawande: The Future Of American Healthcare

Superstar surgeon and medical thinker, writer Atul Gawande on the future of American health and healthcare.

We are well into Obamacare now, and still fighting over it.  Well into panic over healthcare costs, and still struggling to really bring them down.  Well-schooled in how we ought to eat, exercise, live – and still overweight and pushing up the diabetes numbers.  Celebrated surgeon, writer, thinker Dr. Atul Gawande is watching it all.  Thinking it through.  When he’s not in the OR, he’s at the keyboard, helping shape the American conversation on health and healthcare.  This hour, in a special edition of On Point:  On Point Live! - with Dr. Atul Gawande.
-- Tom Ashbrook

Atul Gawande, surgeon, writer and public health researcher. General and endocrine surgeon at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. Professor at the Harvard School of Public Health and Harvard Medical School. Author of "Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on An Imperfect Science,"  "Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance" and "The Checklist Manifesto: How To Get Things Right." (@atul_gawande)

Forbes: Surgeons Know Bad Surgeons When They See Them -- "All surgical procedures carry risks, after all. Even in the best of hands, the procedure Dave Weindel received – gastric bypass – carries a high risk of complications. Some surgeons have higher complication rates than others, but it is often difficult to tell whether this is because some are more skilled or because some surgeons operate on “riskier” patients – those with other medical problems that increase the chances that something will go wrong."

New Yorker: Big Med — "Medicine, though, had held out against the trend. Physicians were always predominantly self-employed, working alone or in small private-practice groups. American hospitals tended to be community-based. But that’s changing. Hospitals and clinics have been forming into large conglomerates. And physicians—facing escalating demands to lower costs, adopt expensive information technology, and account for performance—have been flocking to join them. "

Croakey: Twitter and health policy research – time to get together? — "There is some good company out there in the Twitterverse and some great examples of how to use it effectively. But university-based researchers described social media as being incompatible with research, of high risk professionally, of uncertain efficacy, and – this might be important – an unfamiliar technology that they did not know how to use."