Simple Solutions Keep Coming Out on Top
Right before Christmas, Atul Gawande, a surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and a prolific writer at The New Yorker who writes about the problems and challenges of modern medicine, published a book titled The Checklist Manifesto–How to get things right.
The gist of the book is that by employing simple checklists in hospitals, procedures are performed with fewer complications and patients get healthier. Gawande has been making the rounds on The Daily Show, PBS’ News Hour with Jim Lehrer, NPR and other media outlets promoting his book and discussing the remarkable success checklists can produce.
Dr. Gawande first wrote about the idea of a checklist in The New Yorker in 2007. In that article he discussed the work of Dr. Peter Pronovost, a critical-care specialist at Johns Hopkins Hospital, when he first experimented with a checklist in the ICU to prevent infections in patients with central intravenous lines.
According to Gawande’s article, Dr. Pronovost’s checklist can be likened to those that pilots use to clear their planes for takeoff. Pronovost wrote down the five things that doctors needed to do when inserting central lines that would help avoid infection and the results were remarkable.
Calculations indicated that, in one year in that one hospital, the checklist had prevented forty-three infections and eight deaths, and saved two million dollars.
Those are pretty serious results for a 5-item checklist.
I use Dr. Pronovost’s checklist and Dr. Gawande’s book about checklists to illustrate my point. Oftentimes, simple straightforward solutions can be the ones that make the biggest breakthroughs.
Sound familiar?
Pharos Innovations’ Tel-Assurance has been proven to save lives and millions of dollars and you know why? Because—like a checklist—it is simple and straight-forward. Tel-Assurance doesn’t require special equipment, yet the difference it makes is truly remarkable.
The simplicity of having people use equipment they already have in their home—and equally importantly—having them personally responsible for and involved in their care—makes it easy. Like a checklist, it’s also incredibly effective at keeping patients healthier while saving millions of dollars. And those savings have been demonstrated and validated by third-parties, over, and over again.
I guess, when push comes to shove, Tel-Assurance is really just a daily checklist for patients! They are reminded of the need to take a set of steps each day consistently, and over time learn that these simple steps can lead to consistent improvements in their health.
I think Robin Marantz Henig in her review of Dr. Gawande’s book in the New York Times said it best, “It’s been hard for people to accept its central tenet: that the complexities of technology in the 21st century may be best handled by the simplest solution.”
It may not be easy for people to accept the magnitude of simple solutions, but I’m not sure we can afford not to when the evidence is overwhelming and the need so great. Isn’t it time to ask whether check lists should be part of healthcare? Not just for those doing medical procedures, but also those who’s self-care could benefit as well, ie. patients?
Tags: EHR
