Though in some places around the country the hot weather has just kicked in, summer's last hurrah is around the corner. Now is the last chance to close out the season with a trip to the beach and a good read. The following are 35 recommended reads for surgeons, physicians, healthcare professionals and anyone who wants a closer look at the many facets of healthcare and healthcare business in the United States.
1. "How We Do Harm: A Doctor Breaks Ranks About Being Sick in America" by Otis Webb Braley (2012). Otis Webb Braley, MD, CMO for the American Cancer Society, calls for systemic change through his personal account of the wrongs committed in U.S. medical care and perpetuated by organizations from insurance companies to individual providers.
2. "Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer" by Shannon Brownlee (2008). Journalist Shannon Brownlee exposes the complex, and sometimes perverse, economic incentives that have driven the traditional healthcare system and failed patients and providers time and time again.
3. "The Game Changer: How You Can Drive Revenue and Profit Growth With Innovation" by A.G. Lafley and Ram Charan (2008). Procter & Gamble CEO A.G. Lafley and consultant Ram Charan write about improving and sustaining organic revenue and profit growth at any company through fostering strategic innovation.
4. "Final Exam: A Surgeon's Reflections on Mortality" by Pauline W. Chen (2008). Pauline Chen, MD, a former faculty member at Los Angeles-based UCLA Medical Center, writes about her experiences with mortality, end-of-life and death throughout her medical training and career as a physician.
5. "Ask Me Why I Hurt: The Kids Nobody Wants and the Doctor Who Heals Them" by Randy Christensen (2011). Randy Christensen, MD, tells the story of his life's work: Traveling in an RV retrofitted as a pediatrician's office, and treating impoverished/homeless children and adolescents in and around the Phoenix area, all while navigating the healthcare system and its barriers to care for his patient population.
6. "The Innovator's Prescription" by Clayton R. Christensen, Jerome M. Grossman and Jason Hwang (2008). Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen, Harvard health policy analyst Jerome Grossman, MD, and internist and businessman Jason Hwang, MD, MBA, apply the principles of disruptive innovation to the healthcare system and present a plan for managing care in a way that is sustainable for patients and providers alike.
7. "Hot Lights, Cold Steel: Life, Death and Sleepless Nights in a Surgeon's First Years" by Michael J. Collins (2007). Michael Collins, MD, an orthopedic surgeon, compares romance to reality and reveals the surgeon's introduction to tough choices in this memoir, which covers his residency at Rochester, Minn.-based Mayo Clinic and speaks to the unglamorous experience that is the earliest years of any surgeon's career.
8. "The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do" by Charles Duhigg (2014). New York Times staff writer Charles Duhigg lays bare the power and pitfalls of habit, from diagnosing and altering habits to the powerful predictive properties habits have in personal success, social interactions, commerce and the American economy.
9. "My Lobotomy: A Memoir" by Howard Dully and Charles Fleming (2007). This is the story of 12-year-old Howard Dully's ice-pick lobotomy at the hands of Walter Jackson Freeman II, MD, who pioneered the procedure despite a lack of formal surgical training and performed more than 3,000 lobotomies throughout his career. After spending the first half of his adult life in mental institutions and prisons, Mr. Dully searches for and ultimately finds answers: Why his stepmother volunteered him for the procedure, how his father let it happen and the life outcomes of others of Dr. Freeman's lobotomy patients, lost in the American medical, mental health and judicial systems.
10. "Reinventing American Health Care" by Ezekiel Emanuel (2014). University of Pennsylvania medical ethics professor and health policy expert Ezekiel Emanuel explores how the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is reshaping the American healthcare system. He also offers predictions for where the system is headed as a result of the unprecedented legislative overhaul.
11. "Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science" by Atul Gawande (2003). Atul Gawande, MD, MPH, now professor at both the Harvard School of Public Health and the department of surgery at Harvard Medical School, offers his perspective on the art of surgery, the imperfections that are a reality of the profession and the complexities of applied science through his personal experiences as a surgeon.
12. "Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance" by Atul Gawande (2008). A pseudo-sequel to "Complications," Dr. Gawande examines how surgeons achieve success despite facing immense amounts of risk in their daily work, having limited resources and working with imperfect abilities and information.
13. "The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right" by Atul Gawande (2010). Dr. Gawande continues his exploration of risk, decision-making and error in medicine with an analysis of the power of the checklist in medicine, which in some cases has been shown to reduce surgical mortality by one-third.
14. "Behind the Mask: The Mystique of Surgery And The Surgeons Who Perform Them" by David Gelber (2011). David Gelber, MD, a surgeon with 20 years of experience, examines pre-, inter- and postoperative considerations and problems facing surgeons in their everyday work, bringing humanity and compassion to the decisions that surgeons can face on the job.
15. "David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants" by Malcolm Gladwell (2013). Bestselling author Malcolm Gladwell writes another tremendously popular book on the triumph of the underdog and how success can emerge from seemingly insurmountable conflict, chaos and adversity.
16. "Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?" by Seth Godin (2010). Are you a vital, contributing member in your workplace? Part of the evolution from the managers and the laborers, Seth Godin helps answer the question and examines the new, third class in the workplace: the linchpins, who innovate, venture into the unknown and serve as true developing forces in their professions.
17. "Catastrophic Care: How American Health Care Killed my Father, and How We Can Fix It" by David Goldhill (2013). President and CEO of the Game Show Network David Goldhill writes about the death of his father from a hospital-acquired infection, challenging basic assumptions about healthcare, analyzing its failings and exploring how a system that routinely kills between tens and hundreds of thousands of patients annually can continue business as usual without a major outcry.
18. "How Doctors Think" by Jerome Groopman (2008). Harvard Medical School professor and writer for The New Yorker Jerome Groopman, MD, sheds light on physician-patient interaction. He dissects the decision-making processes physicians go through in their patient interactions and offers physicians advice on how and when to collaborate with patients for transparency, better communication and other skills that can positively impact health outcomes.
19. "Second Opinions: Eight Clinical Dramas of Decision-Making on the Front Lines of Medicine" by Jerome Groopman (2001). Dr. Groopman writes on the decision-making process in complex medical cases, using case studies to illustrate how physicians can come to the best treatment decisions through calling on their humanity and connecting with their patients, in addition to relying on their clinical training.
20. "Thinking, Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman (2011). Economics Nobel Prize-winner Daniel Kahneman, senior scholar and professor emeritus at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, explores the two systems of human decision-making, which are behind intuition, complex decision-making and snap judgements, and how they work together to shape our worldviews.
21. "The Dressing Station: A Surgeon's Chronicle of War and Medicine" by Jonathan Kaplan (2011). Jonathan Kaplan, MD, chronicles his experiences as a battlefield surgeon in wars and disaster zones across the world, using his personal story to delve into the ethics of relief work, the devastating nature of violence in conflict and the struggle to maintain sanity and hope in conditions unthinkable to modern medicine.
22. "Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, the Man Who Would Cure the World" by Tracy Kidder (2003). Pulitzer Prize-winner Tracy Kidder biographies Paul Farmer, MD, PhD, founder of Partners in Health, epidemiologist and anthropologist, and follows Dr. Farmer around the globe in his quest to provide first-world care in third-world countries.
23. "Chaos and Organization in Health Care" by Thomas H. Lee and James M. Morgan (2009). Thomas Lee, MD, and James Morgan, MD, chronicle the chaos in healthcare and postulate it comes from something beneficial: The rapid rate of medical innovation. The pair put forward an optimistic outlook for the U.S. healthcare system, given its ever-increasing clinical capabilities.
24. "Unaccountable: What Hospitals Won't Tell You, and How Transparency Can Revolutionize Health Care" by Marty Makary (2012). In this bestseller, Marty Makary, MD, co-author of the World Health Organization Surgical Checklist, writes on the accountability problem in U.S. healthcare at all levels, and how a lack of accountability seriously hinders quality improvements that would be beneficial to patients and providers alike.
25. "Brain Surgeon: A Doctor's Inspiring Encounters with Mortality and Miracles" by Keith Black and Arnold Mann (2009). This book biographies the life and career of neurosurgeon Keith Mann, MD, chairman of neurosurgery at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, who takes on brain tumor patients on which other surgeons have given up.
26. "A Life Worth Living: A Doctor's Reflections on Illness in a High-Tech Era" by Robert Martensen (2008). Robert Martensen, MD, physician, former National Institutes of Health historian, bioethicist and former professor at Harvard Medical School, ruminates on illness, choices in end-of-life care and when treatment should be considered futile in an era of the best clinical care in history.
27. "Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Expanded Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant" by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne (2004, with a new edition coming out February 2015). The co-directors of the Institut Européen d'Administration des Affaires' Blue Ocean Strategy Institute, Mr. Kim and Ms. Mauborgne put forth the thesis that the best opportunities for capitalizing on market growth come where development has not yet occurred: the "blue ocean." The pair explore the assertion through a study of 150 strategic moves over 100 years.
28. "The Emperor of All Maladies" by Siddhartha Mukherjee (2011). Pulitzer Prize-winning oncologist Siddhartha Mukherjee, MD, "biographies" cancer, which claims the lives of more than 7 million people each year worldwide. Dr. Mukherjee also explores the origins of modern cancer treatment as well as the ethics and humanity of the disease and the effects of its treatment on patients and their families and physicians.
29. "The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper and Fairer Health Care" by T.R. Reid (2010). Author T.R. Reid analyzes the provision of healthcare in industrialized democracies across the world, shedding light on the similarities and differences of American healthcare to healthcare in socioeconomically similar countries.
30. "Confessions of a Surgeon: The Good, the Bad, and the Complicated Life Behind the O.R. Doors" by Paul A. Ruggieri (2012). Paul Ruggieri, MD, former department chairman and current general surgeon, writes about the realities, logistics and ethics of the operating room and tells the stories of what happens during surgery patients may never otherwise hear.
31. "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales" by Oliver Sacks (1998). In this classic neuroscience staple, neuroscientist and physician Oliver Sacks, relays accounts of the most fascinating brain disorders he has encountered during his time as a practicing physician.
32. "Every Patient Tells a Story: Medical Mysteries and the Art of Diagnosis" by Lisa Sanders (2009). Lisa Sanders, MD, assistant professor of internal medicine and education at the Yale University School of Medicine, explores the importance of patient interviews, and delves into how listening to patient stories may prove as valuable a diagnostic tool as clinical information.
33. "The Lonely Patient: How We Experience Illness" by Michael Stein (2009). Michael Stein, a researcher at Brown University, explores the process patients go through when they are diagnosed with and undergo treatment for serious illnesses, focusing on the experience from a patient perspective in relation to "normal" life.
34. "My Own Country: A Doctor's Story" by Abraham Verghese (1995). Abraham Verghese, MD, recounts his experience as a young physician in rural Tennessee dealing with incoming AIDS, and becoming a de facto expert in AIDS care in Johnson City, in which the disease became part of a medical and spiritual crisis.
35. "Bedside Manners: One Doctor's Reflections on the Oddly Intimate Encounters Between Patient and Healer" by David Watts (2007). David Watts, MD, NPR commentator and physician, offers the real-life stories of patients and their humanity, chronicling odd encounters, discontent among colleagues, difficult diagnoses and the strength of the human spirit against long odds.
1. "How We Do Harm: A Doctor Breaks Ranks About Being Sick in America" by Otis Webb Braley (2012). Otis Webb Braley, MD, CMO for the American Cancer Society, calls for systemic change through his personal account of the wrongs committed in U.S. medical care and perpetuated by organizations from insurance companies to individual providers.
2. "Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer" by Shannon Brownlee (2008). Journalist Shannon Brownlee exposes the complex, and sometimes perverse, economic incentives that have driven the traditional healthcare system and failed patients and providers time and time again.
3. "The Game Changer: How You Can Drive Revenue and Profit Growth With Innovation" by A.G. Lafley and Ram Charan (2008). Procter & Gamble CEO A.G. Lafley and consultant Ram Charan write about improving and sustaining organic revenue and profit growth at any company through fostering strategic innovation.
4. "Final Exam: A Surgeon's Reflections on Mortality" by Pauline W. Chen (2008). Pauline Chen, MD, a former faculty member at Los Angeles-based UCLA Medical Center, writes about her experiences with mortality, end-of-life and death throughout her medical training and career as a physician.
5. "Ask Me Why I Hurt: The Kids Nobody Wants and the Doctor Who Heals Them" by Randy Christensen (2011). Randy Christensen, MD, tells the story of his life's work: Traveling in an RV retrofitted as a pediatrician's office, and treating impoverished/homeless children and adolescents in and around the Phoenix area, all while navigating the healthcare system and its barriers to care for his patient population.
6. "The Innovator's Prescription" by Clayton R. Christensen, Jerome M. Grossman and Jason Hwang (2008). Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen, Harvard health policy analyst Jerome Grossman, MD, and internist and businessman Jason Hwang, MD, MBA, apply the principles of disruptive innovation to the healthcare system and present a plan for managing care in a way that is sustainable for patients and providers alike.
7. "Hot Lights, Cold Steel: Life, Death and Sleepless Nights in a Surgeon's First Years" by Michael J. Collins (2007). Michael Collins, MD, an orthopedic surgeon, compares romance to reality and reveals the surgeon's introduction to tough choices in this memoir, which covers his residency at Rochester, Minn.-based Mayo Clinic and speaks to the unglamorous experience that is the earliest years of any surgeon's career.
8. "The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do" by Charles Duhigg (2014). New York Times staff writer Charles Duhigg lays bare the power and pitfalls of habit, from diagnosing and altering habits to the powerful predictive properties habits have in personal success, social interactions, commerce and the American economy.
9. "My Lobotomy: A Memoir" by Howard Dully and Charles Fleming (2007). This is the story of 12-year-old Howard Dully's ice-pick lobotomy at the hands of Walter Jackson Freeman II, MD, who pioneered the procedure despite a lack of formal surgical training and performed more than 3,000 lobotomies throughout his career. After spending the first half of his adult life in mental institutions and prisons, Mr. Dully searches for and ultimately finds answers: Why his stepmother volunteered him for the procedure, how his father let it happen and the life outcomes of others of Dr. Freeman's lobotomy patients, lost in the American medical, mental health and judicial systems.
10. "Reinventing American Health Care" by Ezekiel Emanuel (2014). University of Pennsylvania medical ethics professor and health policy expert Ezekiel Emanuel explores how the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is reshaping the American healthcare system. He also offers predictions for where the system is headed as a result of the unprecedented legislative overhaul.
11. "Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science" by Atul Gawande (2003). Atul Gawande, MD, MPH, now professor at both the Harvard School of Public Health and the department of surgery at Harvard Medical School, offers his perspective on the art of surgery, the imperfections that are a reality of the profession and the complexities of applied science through his personal experiences as a surgeon.
12. "Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance" by Atul Gawande (2008). A pseudo-sequel to "Complications," Dr. Gawande examines how surgeons achieve success despite facing immense amounts of risk in their daily work, having limited resources and working with imperfect abilities and information.
13. "The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right" by Atul Gawande (2010). Dr. Gawande continues his exploration of risk, decision-making and error in medicine with an analysis of the power of the checklist in medicine, which in some cases has been shown to reduce surgical mortality by one-third.
14. "Behind the Mask: The Mystique of Surgery And The Surgeons Who Perform Them" by David Gelber (2011). David Gelber, MD, a surgeon with 20 years of experience, examines pre-, inter- and postoperative considerations and problems facing surgeons in their everyday work, bringing humanity and compassion to the decisions that surgeons can face on the job.
15. "David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants" by Malcolm Gladwell (2013). Bestselling author Malcolm Gladwell writes another tremendously popular book on the triumph of the underdog and how success can emerge from seemingly insurmountable conflict, chaos and adversity.
16. "Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?" by Seth Godin (2010). Are you a vital, contributing member in your workplace? Part of the evolution from the managers and the laborers, Seth Godin helps answer the question and examines the new, third class in the workplace: the linchpins, who innovate, venture into the unknown and serve as true developing forces in their professions.
17. "Catastrophic Care: How American Health Care Killed my Father, and How We Can Fix It" by David Goldhill (2013). President and CEO of the Game Show Network David Goldhill writes about the death of his father from a hospital-acquired infection, challenging basic assumptions about healthcare, analyzing its failings and exploring how a system that routinely kills between tens and hundreds of thousands of patients annually can continue business as usual without a major outcry.
18. "How Doctors Think" by Jerome Groopman (2008). Harvard Medical School professor and writer for The New Yorker Jerome Groopman, MD, sheds light on physician-patient interaction. He dissects the decision-making processes physicians go through in their patient interactions and offers physicians advice on how and when to collaborate with patients for transparency, better communication and other skills that can positively impact health outcomes.
19. "Second Opinions: Eight Clinical Dramas of Decision-Making on the Front Lines of Medicine" by Jerome Groopman (2001). Dr. Groopman writes on the decision-making process in complex medical cases, using case studies to illustrate how physicians can come to the best treatment decisions through calling on their humanity and connecting with their patients, in addition to relying on their clinical training.
20. "Thinking, Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman (2011). Economics Nobel Prize-winner Daniel Kahneman, senior scholar and professor emeritus at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, explores the two systems of human decision-making, which are behind intuition, complex decision-making and snap judgements, and how they work together to shape our worldviews.
21. "The Dressing Station: A Surgeon's Chronicle of War and Medicine" by Jonathan Kaplan (2011). Jonathan Kaplan, MD, chronicles his experiences as a battlefield surgeon in wars and disaster zones across the world, using his personal story to delve into the ethics of relief work, the devastating nature of violence in conflict and the struggle to maintain sanity and hope in conditions unthinkable to modern medicine.
22. "Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, the Man Who Would Cure the World" by Tracy Kidder (2003). Pulitzer Prize-winner Tracy Kidder biographies Paul Farmer, MD, PhD, founder of Partners in Health, epidemiologist and anthropologist, and follows Dr. Farmer around the globe in his quest to provide first-world care in third-world countries.
23. "Chaos and Organization in Health Care" by Thomas H. Lee and James M. Morgan (2009). Thomas Lee, MD, and James Morgan, MD, chronicle the chaos in healthcare and postulate it comes from something beneficial: The rapid rate of medical innovation. The pair put forward an optimistic outlook for the U.S. healthcare system, given its ever-increasing clinical capabilities.
24. "Unaccountable: What Hospitals Won't Tell You, and How Transparency Can Revolutionize Health Care" by Marty Makary (2012). In this bestseller, Marty Makary, MD, co-author of the World Health Organization Surgical Checklist, writes on the accountability problem in U.S. healthcare at all levels, and how a lack of accountability seriously hinders quality improvements that would be beneficial to patients and providers alike.
25. "Brain Surgeon: A Doctor's Inspiring Encounters with Mortality and Miracles" by Keith Black and Arnold Mann (2009). This book biographies the life and career of neurosurgeon Keith Mann, MD, chairman of neurosurgery at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, who takes on brain tumor patients on which other surgeons have given up.
26. "A Life Worth Living: A Doctor's Reflections on Illness in a High-Tech Era" by Robert Martensen (2008). Robert Martensen, MD, physician, former National Institutes of Health historian, bioethicist and former professor at Harvard Medical School, ruminates on illness, choices in end-of-life care and when treatment should be considered futile in an era of the best clinical care in history.
27. "Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Expanded Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant" by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne (2004, with a new edition coming out February 2015). The co-directors of the Institut Européen d'Administration des Affaires' Blue Ocean Strategy Institute, Mr. Kim and Ms. Mauborgne put forth the thesis that the best opportunities for capitalizing on market growth come where development has not yet occurred: the "blue ocean." The pair explore the assertion through a study of 150 strategic moves over 100 years.
28. "The Emperor of All Maladies" by Siddhartha Mukherjee (2011). Pulitzer Prize-winning oncologist Siddhartha Mukherjee, MD, "biographies" cancer, which claims the lives of more than 7 million people each year worldwide. Dr. Mukherjee also explores the origins of modern cancer treatment as well as the ethics and humanity of the disease and the effects of its treatment on patients and their families and physicians.
29. "The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper and Fairer Health Care" by T.R. Reid (2010). Author T.R. Reid analyzes the provision of healthcare in industrialized democracies across the world, shedding light on the similarities and differences of American healthcare to healthcare in socioeconomically similar countries.
30. "Confessions of a Surgeon: The Good, the Bad, and the Complicated Life Behind the O.R. Doors" by Paul A. Ruggieri (2012). Paul Ruggieri, MD, former department chairman and current general surgeon, writes about the realities, logistics and ethics of the operating room and tells the stories of what happens during surgery patients may never otherwise hear.
31. "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales" by Oliver Sacks (1998). In this classic neuroscience staple, neuroscientist and physician Oliver Sacks, relays accounts of the most fascinating brain disorders he has encountered during his time as a practicing physician.
32. "Every Patient Tells a Story: Medical Mysteries and the Art of Diagnosis" by Lisa Sanders (2009). Lisa Sanders, MD, assistant professor of internal medicine and education at the Yale University School of Medicine, explores the importance of patient interviews, and delves into how listening to patient stories may prove as valuable a diagnostic tool as clinical information.
33. "The Lonely Patient: How We Experience Illness" by Michael Stein (2009). Michael Stein, a researcher at Brown University, explores the process patients go through when they are diagnosed with and undergo treatment for serious illnesses, focusing on the experience from a patient perspective in relation to "normal" life.
34. "My Own Country: A Doctor's Story" by Abraham Verghese (1995). Abraham Verghese, MD, recounts his experience as a young physician in rural Tennessee dealing with incoming AIDS, and becoming a de facto expert in AIDS care in Johnson City, in which the disease became part of a medical and spiritual crisis.
35. "Bedside Manners: One Doctor's Reflections on the Oddly Intimate Encounters Between Patient and Healer" by David Watts (2007). David Watts, MD, NPR commentator and physician, offers the real-life stories of patients and their humanity, chronicling odd encounters, discontent among colleagues, difficult diagnoses and the strength of the human spirit against long odds.