Kaiser Permanente, one of the world's leading health care providers, is an object lesson in the complex and frustrating challenges facing so many healthcare organizations today. It can boast of highly efficient medical teams performing clinical miracles, but it also had organizational troubles so deep rooted that, in the mid-1990s, patients and physicians fled in droves.
In The Doctor Crisis, Jack Cochran, executive director of The Permanente Foundation, and author Charles Kenney use the example of Kaiser to shed light on the organizational problems plaguing American health today; and to show how we can improve healthcare on a grass roots level, regardless of political policy disputes, by improving conditions for primary care physicians.
Doctors, they argue, are the key to making health care in the United States truly great-but doctors today are at record levels dissatisfied with the system in which they work. Cochran and Kenny believe we can fundamentally...