University Hospitals : Doctors and Patients

The last fifty years have produced incredible advances in U.S. health care with the introduction of heart surgery, organ transplantation, joint replacement, new antibiotics, and effective therapies for hypertension and for cancer. Nearly all these advances have taken place in our nation's 200 University hospitals. The author, a noted cardiologist and medical educator who has spent his entire career in University Hospitals, gives his eyewitness accounts of these incredible changes in health care. He tells us about the physicians who made these advances possible and the patients who benefited. He describes two major side effects of these advances- the incredible escalation in the costs of health care, and the fact that high-tech health care has often become low-touch impersonal care. He offers some potential solutions.