Healthcare Valuation: The Four Pillars of Healthcare Value, Volume 1

Foreword

This comprehensive book traces the structure and economies of the healthcare system in the United States from its origins through the present day, as the foundation for the financial appraisal of healthcare enterprises, assets, and services.

It is based on exhaustive research and the 20-plus years of experience of Bob Cimasi's firm, Health Capital Consultants (its library holds over 50,000 books, papers, etc.). The book is heavily documented—the first chapter alone has more than 300 footnotes, and the second, more than 650!

While Bob is one of the most incisive authors covering the healthcare system, he is at the same time one of the system's harshest critics. For example, he makes reference to “the falling rank of U.S. health status as compared to other developed nations,” and

The last two decades have seen the accelerated transformation of the U.S. healthcare professions into a service industry enterprise, whereby health services have been unitized, protocolized, and homogenized, in order to facilitate their sale in the market, just as if they were any other fungible market commodity, e.g., soybeans and pork bellies.

Note his frequent use of italics for emphasis, so that the reader can almost hear him speaking.

His chapter on technology gets into the value drivers of management technology, as well as what we more conventionally think of as scientific technology. For example, he offers statistics on the rise in the incidence, complexity, and cost of both Electronic ...