On this post, Shangwen wrote,
So far in this project, I’ve found that for a particular disorder, clinicians employing a rigorous and objective diagnostic tool can cure a patient for about $4,000. Left to their own devices, hunches, and bias, that cost routinely surpasses $10,000, even though the patient has long since ceased to benefit. This is on the public dime.
Read his entire comment.
READER COMMENTS
Tracy W
Feb 17 2011 at 11:29am
This matches with what Atul Gwandee’s The CheckList Manifesto indicates, and with the results of Project Followthrough in education – that there’s a lot of efficiency improvements to be gained by being rigorous about what doctors and teachers and the like do and by applying a more standardised approach.
(By standardised approach, this means things like “checking that each kid can read this document and isn’t just following behind what the quicker kids are saying” or “always introducing the surgical team members to each other before the operation starts”.)
Shangwen
Feb 17 2011 at 12:04pm
Hi Tracy, I haven’t read the book but am familiar with checklist procedures. This is an extremely cheap innovation since it relies on statistical analysis, some process engineering and–the costliest part–training and enforcement. Interestingly, checklist-type procedures such as automated orders, standardized best practice guidelines of a certain level of detail, and plain old to-do lists, often meet fierce resistance because they involve the humbling of bias.
I believe checklists as a quality tool were invented by the Babylonians, so perhaps time is on my side.
Doc Merlin
Feb 17 2011 at 4:14pm
And if that clinician is House, the patient will have kidney, and liver failure by the time he is diagnosed, as well.
Shangwen
Feb 18 2011 at 11:55am
And further to this issue:
http://modeledbehavior.com/2011/02/17/cowen-malthus-and-watson/
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