Weekly Article: Cheesecake Factory and Medicine

Big Med by Atul Gawande
posted by Mike Quinn MD 

Here’s a non-scientific article that wonders how medicine could be different as a profession, business, and institution if some of the methods used by familiar businesses to deliver high-quality products and services were adopted for the health care of people. Dr Gawande is a Neurosurgeon at The Brigham in Boston. He’s written a number of articles like this – it’s sort of Medical Infotainment, but it’s pretty high quality infotainment. He presents some provocative ideas in a reasoned, non-threatening manner. I don’t think that the answer to improving health care in this country and averting disaster will come from creating the Sheik Zayed Children’s National Medical Center and Cheesecake Factory, but many of the principles he discusses can be put to use in our department and our division. Might be good if we started doing them ourselves before somebody gets the bright idea to do it for us.