The Diagnostician
Why American Healthcare Has Been Treated for the Wrong Disease — and the Executive-Physician Who Can Cure It
by Thomas Powell, MD MS
The Argument
American healthcare is ill, and the symptoms are everywhere — spending, burnout, quality, safety, outcomes, data, and technology. The technology that promised relief is, in too many places, a treatment with side effects of its own.
For three decades the response has been treatment after treatment. Payment reform. Electronic health records. Value-based purchasing. Quality measurement. More recently, clinical AI, ambient documentation, telehealth, digital health at scale. Each was prescribed before the diagnosis was ever made. The patient has been treated for the wrong disease.
In The Diagnostician, Thomas Powell, MD — practicing physician, Chief Medical Information Officer, and executive — proposes something nearly absent from the modern conversation: stop. Step back. Apply the clinical method to American healthcare itself. Take the chief complaint. Examine the vital signs. Order the workup. Rule out the wrong diagnoses. Arrive at the working diagnosis. Then — and only then — prescribe.
The book runs that workup.
The Chief Medical Information Officer is the role specifically built to lead the diagnostic and treatment process the system itself now requires.
This is the case for that leadership — and the clinical method that gets us there.
Praise
[Endorsements will appear here as foreword respondents return their words. The book is currently with David Lubarsky, MD (Westchester Medical Center Health Network); Jacques E. Orces, MD (Nicklaus Children's Health System); W. Ed Hammond, PhD (Duke Center for Health Informatics); and Ronald M. Razmi, MD (Zoi).]
From the Foreword
[Foreword excerpt will appear here once selected.]
A Note from the Author
[A 200-word personal statement drawn from the book's "A Word from the Diagnostician" front matter — to be added.]
For Media & Reviewers
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