Jefferson Health CEO Dr. Stephen Klasko and General Catalyst Managing Director Hemant Taneja Release New Book: UnHealthcare: A Manifesto for Health Assurance

PHILADELPHIA and SAN FRANCISCO, July 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- The United States needs a revolution in the delivery of healthcare, especially after the coronavirus pandemic, say the authors of a new book calling for a system based on "health assurance."

Their book, UnHealthcare: A Manifesto for Health Assurance, is itself a collaboration between traditional academic health system and Silicon Valley venture investment. Hemant Taneja is managing director for General Catalyst in San Francisco, and Stephen K. Klasko, MD, is the President and CEO of Thomas Jefferson University and Jefferson Health in Philadelphia. Co-author Kevin Maney is a best-selling technology journalist who co-authored Taneja's previous book, Unscaled.

Their book offers a how-to for creating a platform for a revolutionary future for healthcare, Taneja said. "Health assurance is an emerging category of consumer-centric, data-driven healthcare services that are designed to bend the cost curve of care and help us stay well."

Over the past two years, the authors have launched a collaboration to re-imagine healthcare itself. "People don't want to be patients," Dr. Klasko said. "People want to live productive and happy lives without healthcare getting in the way. We've started at the wrong side. We've been building hospital facilities when people really need healthcare with no address."

The coronavirus pandemic has accelerated the need for this revolution, Dr. Klasko said. "Covid-19 hit hardest families of color, unveiling the deep inequities that exist in healthcare today. Further, the pandemic forced doctors to take care of people at home through technology, and it accelerated the digital conversion of the economy in general. We need a healthcare system for these new realities."

The book is written to inspire entrepreneurs to join the re-invention of healthcare, Taneja said. "When working with people and their health, we cannot simply apply a break-it-fast, Silicon Valley mindset. We need to understand the real needs people have and express, and ensure we're devoting responsible innovation to transforming how we help those people."

Because the new healthcare requires high levels of trust, the book details policy reforms as well as guidelines for ethical product development.  "Every positive disruption in our society has caused some pain to the traditional system. Incremental tweaking will not transform our broken, fragmented, expensive and inequitable system," Dr. Klasko said. "We cannot depend on government alone. It will take creative and unlikely partnerships to have healthcare come out of the Covid-19 crisis to a new age of digital, mobile consumerism."

UnHealthcare: A Manifesto for Health Assurance is available for purchase at lulu.com, or through healthassurance.ai, and will soon be available at Amazon and other outlets.

Website: For more information on the authors, and links to the book, see healthassurance.ai.

SOURCE Jefferson Health