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Tag: Customization

What the World Might Look Like If We Taught Docs How to Hack Spreadsheets

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I am an IT geek physician. I have my an EHR which I created and control.

Today, I wanted to understand my diabetic practice a little more, so I dumped all my HbA1c data out of my EHR and into a spreadsheet where I was able to manipulate the data and learn a few things about my practice.

I learned that:

If my patient had a HbA1c ≥ 8, the likelihood that the HbA1c would be < 8 at the next visit is 68%.

If my patient had a HbA1c ≥ 8, the likelihood the HbA1c would be even higher at the subsequent visit is 29%.

If my patient had a HbA1c ≥ 8, the average change in the HbA1c at the next visit was -0.7.

If my patient had a HbA1c < 8, the likelihood that HbA1c at the subsequent visit would exceed 8% would be 15%.

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What Healthcare Must Learn — from a Chain Restaurant

In Healthcare Beyond Reform: Doing it Right For Half The Cost I lay out the five strategies that healthcare must adopt, and is adopting in various ways and places, to make healthcare better and cheaper at the same time.

Strategy Five is “Rebuild Every Process.” It’s about “lean manufacturing,” smart standardization, measurement, “big data,” evidence-based design, teaching the innovation, all the detailed, rigorous, hard attention to intelligent process re-design that healthcare is so obviously lacking — and that is absolutely necessary if healthcare is to improve its abysmal cost/benefit ratio.

Now in The New Yorker writer/surgeon Atul Gawande has done a brilliant turn on this theme, by diving into, of all things, the processes of a restaurant chain, comparing them to the duplicative, chaotic, mistake-prone processes of traditional healthcare, and finally to some examples of smart, rebuilt healthcare processes that drive down costs while killing fewer people.

Gawande shows how The Cheesecake Factory manages to deliver 308 dinner menu items and 124 beverage choices to exacting standards, on time, from fresh ingredients, with only 2.5% wastage, in a linen-napkin and silverware environment, at lower cost, then compares that with the disconnected, uncoordinated, messy environment that is most of US healthcare. He details several examples of how new drives toward standardization and control of processes in the operating room and the emergency department, for instance, are making a difference, lowering costs and improving not only outcomes but the patient experience, all at the same time.

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