Monday, August 6, 2012

Can Hospitals Be More Like Restaurant Chains?

8/6/12. Atul Gawande, M.D. in the New Yorker:

"...I’d come from the hospital that day. In medicine, too, we are trying to deliver a range of services to millions of people at a reasonable cost and with a consistent level of quality. Unlike the Cheesecake Factory, we haven’t figured out how. Our costs are soaring, the service is typically mediocre, and the quality is unreliable. Every clinician has his or her own way of doing things, and the rates of failure and complication (not to mention the costs) for a given service routinely vary by a factor of two or three, even within the same hospital..."
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/08/13/120813fa_fact_gawande

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