Registration now closed

Author Talk | Piecing Together American Health Care

Award-winning physician and author, Dr. Ilana Yurkiewicz, discusses how pervasive cracks in the health care system cost us time, energy, and lives, and how we can fix them.

There’s an unspoken assumption when you go to see a doctor: the doctor knows your medical story and is making decisions based on that story. But the reality frequently falls short. Medical records vanish when we switch doctors. Critical details of life-saving treatment plans get lost in muddled electronic charts. The doctors we see change according to specialty, hospital shifts, or an insurer’s whims.

Stanford physician Ilana Yurkiewicz calls this fragmentation, and, in her new book, Fragmented: A Doctor’s Quest to Piece Together American Health Care, she reveals, it’s the central failure of health care today. In this gripping narrative from medicine’s front lines, she shows how a system that doesn’t talk to itself forces doctors, patients, and their loved ones to go to heroic lengths to bridge the gaps. With lives at stake and little other choice, we all do so, but the system is hanging by a thread, and we need better solutions. Radiantly humane, empowering, and ultimately hopeful, Fragmented is a prescription for what really needs fixing in modern medicine.

Dr. Yurkiewicz is a primary care doctor with fellowship training and board certification in internal medicine, oncology, and hematology. She is a Clinical Assistant Professor of Primary Care and Population Health in the Department of Medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine. Dr. Yurkiewicz holds an M.D. from Harvard Medical School and a B.S. from Yale University.

Dr. Yurkiewicz is also an award-winning medical journalist whose work has been published in The Atlantic, Scientific American, Undark, The Best American Science and Nature Writing, and elsewhere. Fragmented is her first book.

Registration is required. Registration closes at the start of the program. Please contact the Customer Contact Center if in need of assistance accessing the program at 770-978-5154.

*Presented by Adult Services

Upcoming events