by Al Lewis
The most influential healthcare book of 2019 is The Price We Pay.
How influential? Besides being featured on almost every major media outlet and likely reaching the (bottom of the) New York Times bestseller list soon, it has already led to the resignation of one of the perps. Her hospital was exposed for surprise-billing patients and then suing them at a prodigious rate to collect the windfall.
The author, Dr. Marty Makary, is the inventor of the surgical checklist, later popularized in The Checklist Manifesto. His previous New York Times bestseller, Unaccountable, was made into the hit TV series The Resident.
His new book, The Price We Pay, hugely expands the scope of Unaccountable. It combines two years of investigative journalism with Dr. Makary’s deep expertise in medicine and policy to shine a light on some of the major issues in healthcare. Examples:
ERs and hospitals sending surprise medical bills and the stress, cost and lawsuits they generate;
the wellness industry “screening-industrialist complex,” which, by ignoring clinical guidelines, massively overdiagnoses employee populations at great expense, and
huge amounts of overtreatment caused by rampant health illiteracy and inappropriate demands for interventions.
Fortunately, we’ve got your back on all three. First, Quizzify has created the solution to surprise ER/emergency admission medical bills. (Dr. Makary gets a huge assist on this.) You can implement this as soon as new insurance cards are mailed out, just by putting this simple language, or some variation of it, on the card. (It won’t put the kibosh on every surprise bill – but even preventing a few of them saves a ton of money and stress. This language should prevent way more than a few.)
Second, Quizzify offers a screening-optimization protocol using US Preventive Services Task Force guidelines. This protocol (that fits on a single page!) doesn’t just prevent massive, expensive and stressful over-diagnosis. It also inoculates you against Yale-type lawsuits for wellness program overreach.
Finally, and most importantly is employee health literacy. The Price We Pay gives Quizzify – the very same Quizzify you have implemented, are about to implement, or are thinking of implementing -- a terrific shout-out as the solution to employee health illiteracy. Just a brief excerpt from the book:
[Quizzify] alerts employees to the most common unnecessary tests and procedures in medicine today, according to the Choosing Wisely campaign… Using a comedic, engaging style, Quizzify educates people on highly relevant techniques they can use to make everyday decisions from how to read a nutrition label to how to ask questions about common medical procedures.
This book may even make it to your C-Suite. (Many highly placed executives read Unaccountable.) If they start questioning you on these three items above, Quizzify customers will be able to say, in the immortal words of the great philosophers at Staples’ advertising agency: “Yeah, we’ve got that.”
If you would like more information about Quizzify and our surprise billing solution, just click here for more information.
Quizzify provides the education employees need to be health-literate, wiser and more confident healthcare consumers
Teach employees how to navigate the ins and outs of their health benefits and gain valuable information about better health practices. With quizzes reviewed by doctors at Harvard Medical School, Quizzify helps employees live healthier lives and save money on healthcare... without collecting any private health information.
Benefits are of no value if employees don’t use them. You can customize Quizzify so that your quiz questions can explain exactly what the value is...and our “learn more” links can point employees to exactly where they need to go.
