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Should health care practices be standardized?
One of the things I like about my undergrad alumni magazine is the classified ads. There is always something eye-catching. Like this one that was listed under “Employment Opportunities.” Family Medical...
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How long do patients wait?
This week’s The Numbers Guy column in the Wall Street Journal looks at how long patients wait for care (Long Medical Waits Prove Hard to Cure, May 25). The setting to have in mind is not how many...
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Children’s Memorial & the logistics of moving a hospital
So have you ever had a hard time getting a kid into the car? You ready to go, you’re running late and someone is just being fussy, arching their back, and refusing to be a good cooperator. That’s...
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The medical implications of the Cheesecake Factory
A recent New Yorker article by Atul Gawande has gotten a lot of attention (Big Med, Aug 13). The article is built around an intriguing observation: The Cheesecake Factory can churn out a high variety...
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Odds & ends: Fashion week to heart attacks
It’s time to clear out a bunch of articles of that I have had kicking around. First up, we note that it has been Fashion Week in New York and that has led a couple of interesting articles: The New...
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A lean hospital:Virginia Mason Medical Center
Over the years, we have had several posts applying lean operations to health care (see, for example, this or that). However, we have yet (I think) to post anything on Virginia Mason. Despite what its...
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What explains the price of a flu vaccine?
It’s been a bad flu season with hospitals in many cities overwhelmed with patients. This is largely a preventable problem. The annual flu vaccine is not perfect but a wider use of the vaccine would...
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Overbooking the doctor’s office
For all the faults of its roll out, the Affordable Care Act should ultimately provide more people with health insurance and thus a way to pay for basic health care. That implicitly assumes that there...
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Nudging physicians to follow standard procedures
Much of operations is about standardization. There is much to be gained from building processes that are appropriately tailored to the task at hand and handling that task in the same “best” way every...
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Process improvement in the operating room
Check out these number from the Wall Street Journal (How to Make Surgery Safer, Feb 16). A little disconcerting, eh? Now there are obviously a lot of surgeries taking place every day in the US, so on a...
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