New Books in Medicine

Veronica Villarreal earned her joint MHA/MBA at the University of Houston–Clear Lake, took her first job out of the program at DHR Health in the Rio Grande Valley, and worked her way up through revenue cycle and operations into the C-suite. She served as Chief Ambulatory Officer over a network of roughly 75 clinic locations and more than 30 specialty service lines. She then moved to UT Health Rio Grande Valley, where she is now Chief Operating Officer.
Along the way, she wrote the book she wishes someone had handed her. C-Suite Bound: How Self-Discovery Leads to Ultimate Success became an Amazon bestseller and was featured in Forbes.
In this episode, Veronica traces the actual route: why revenue cycle turned out to be an executive on-ramp rather than a detour, what an interim title really tests, what it takes to move from a private specialty network into an academic health system, and why she thinks comparison is the thing most likely to derail a talented person’s career.
Flight Path is produced by the Department of Healthcare Administration at the University of Houston–Clear Lake, which has offered healthcare administration education since 1974 and is based in the Texas Medical Center.
A University of Houston - Clear Lake MHA/MBA grad who climbed from revenue cycle to COO, and then wrote the roadmap for everyone behind her.
GUEST BIO
Veronica Villarreal, MHA/MBA, is Chief Operating Officer of UT Health Rio Grande Valley.
At UT Health RGV, she previously served as Assistant Vice President of Operations, leading multi-site ambulatory operations.
Before that, she was Chief Ambulatory Officer at DHR Health Clinics, overseeing approximately 75 clinic locations across more than 30 specialty and sub-specialty service lines.
She began her career in ambulatory revenue cycle.
She is the author of C-Suite Bound: How Self-Discovery Leads to Ultimate Success, an Amazon bestseller featured in Forbes.
She holds a joint Master of Healthcare Administration and Master of Business Administration from the University of Houston–Clear Lake.
LINKS FROM THIS EPISODE
C-Suite Bound: How Self-Discovery Leads to Ultimate Success
Veronica’s website
Veronica on LinkedIn
UHCL alumni feature, “From quiet corners to big impact”

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Strikingly clear, humane and helpful, this is an essential book for anyone seeking to understand autism and the autistic spectrum. Drawing on many years of clinical experience and research, as well as the testimonies of autistic people, Autisms (Penguin, 2026) is an up-to-the minute account of the many indicative features of autism and how they have been assessed and treated over almost a century.
As rates of autism diagnosis escalate in almost all high-income countries, researchers today mostly agree that there is no single cause or even single clinical picture of autism. Rather than a neat and well-defined entity, autism is described as a spectrum or constellation of traits, varying in intensity, distribution and severity, with practically everyone in the general population showing at least some autistic trait or feature.
At the same time, there has been a radical split between the ways in which autism is perceived. For many, it is a disorder, a pathology based on a deficit, whereas for others it is an identity, a natural variation in human cognitive and behavioural diversity.
For anyone facing the special challenges of autism, it can be hard to find clarity amid such complexity and contradiction, making Darian Leader’s illuminating guide to the field of autism research and treatment particularly welcome.

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Based on the groundbreaking podcast of the same name, Last Day: How to Stop Losing Our Loved Ones to the Opioid Crisis (Gallery/Lemonada Books, 2026) is borne of Stephanie Wittels Wachs’s determination to shed light on the ongoing opioid epidemic in America. After the tragic and untimely death of her brother Harris Wittels to an opioid overdose, Stephanie connected with Jessica Cordova Kramer, whose brother died under nearly identical circumstances. Together they launched Last Day, a podcast that facilitates unflinching conversations with addiction specialists, harm reductionists, people in long-term recovery, public policy experts pushing for reform, and many others, to determine what could have saved their brothers lives and how we can prevent overdose deaths moving forward. This August, Steph published a book by the same name. Last Day weaves together a heartbreaking story of personal loss and an unflinching investigation of what could have prevented it. Alongside expert voices on opioid addiction, this book issues a clarion call for change in an ongoing and overwhelming opioid crisis.
In this episode, Steph and host Emily Dufton discuss Steph's transformational journey from acute grief to investigative reporting on the state of American drug treatment today. While she still struggles with the loss of Harris, Last Day, in book and podcast form, offer hope for potential solutions and a guidebook for people still in the thick of the struggle.
Emily Dufton is the author of Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America and Addiction, Inc.: Medication-Assisted Treatment and America's Forgotten War on Drugs.

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Chekhov liked to joke that he was a doctor by profession and merely did literary work in his spare time. Behind the joke lies an intriguing truth. We remember Chekhov as a towering literary figure, but medicine and humanitarian work occupied much of his life and profoundly shaped the way he encountered human suffering.
Nowhere is this more striking than in his remarkable journey across Siberia to Sakhalin Island. Travelling through an immense and unforgiving landscape to investigate conditions in the penal colony, Chekhov undertook an expedition that he would remember as one of the defining experiences of his life. Written by a neuroscientist and practising clinician, Chekhov’s Sakhalin Journey: Doctor, Humanitarian, Writer (Bloomsbury, 2023) follows Chekhov along this extraordinary route, drawing on his own account to reveal the doctor, humanitarian and observer behind the celebrated author. The result is a richer portrait of Chekhov, one that asks us to see his medicine and literature not as competing lives, but as different expressions of the same searching attention to human experience and the determination to not ‘do nothing’ to improve human lives.
Professor Jonathan Cole (MA, MSc, DM, FRCP, FTPS), is a British consultant clinical neurophysiologist, author, and researcher known for combining neuroscience with first-person patient narratives. He serves as a consultant at the University Hospital in Dorset, a visiting professor at Bournemouth University, and has served as the President of the International Federation of Clinical Neurophysiology. Inspired by his mentor and friend Oliver Sacks, Cole’s work heavily emphasizes the subjective, lived experience of individuals surviving rare or severe neurological conditions.
Jonathan is one of those rare scientists who combines both the rigor of scientific investigations with literary endeavours and even theatre. I will include both Jonathan’s personal website and his website for his collaborations in theatrical productions.
Dr. Anya Daly is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy and Ethics in the School of Arts and Society, University of Tasmania. Interdisciplinary collaborations are at the core of Anya’s research interests. She investigates the intersections of phenomenology with philosophy of mind, the philosophy of perception, the philosophy of psychiatry, embodied and social cognition, enactivism, ethics, aesthetics and Buddhist Philosophy.

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In this special installment of the University of Notre Dame Press's Books for Better Understanding, Paul Scherz, the Our Lady of Guadalupe Professor of Theology with the University of Notre Dame, and Travis Pickell, Assistant Professor at George Fox University, get together to discuss their books, The Ethics of Precision Medicine: The Problems of Prevention in Healthcare, and Burdened Agency: Christian Theology and End-of-Life Ethics, both available from the University of Notre Dame Press.
You can purchase The Ethics of Precision Medicine here
You can purchase Burdened Agency here

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