Rodent Regatta

There’s almost no equal to the kind of fear, worry and helplessness that people feel when a dire medical diagnosis is given. Yet, ”information accidents” as discussed in this excerpt are quite common.

I visited Richard Saul Wurman at his home in Newport, Rhode Island a few weeks ago with my friend Ted Stout. I asked him what he thought about the fact that more people die from information accidents in hospitals than die in car wrecks.

He said, ”Medical care is delivered by people. People screw up. If you have to go to the hospital, the best thing you can take is an advocate—a friend who can ask questions, use common sense, look over the nurse’s shoulder and call somebody if your condition changes.”

He went on. ”When I go for a physical, I get them to draw double blood. They send the samples to two different labs. A ’miss’ can hurt you more than a false positive.” He continued, ”It’s insurance against mistaking your sample for someone else’s—a mistake that’s more common than we’d like to believe.” I wonder how many SMART People’s lives will be saved by this little trick.

David Isenberg
SMART Letter #83

Read what one of the researchers in the field of quality management had to say. Only with the aid of her knowledge of W. Edwards Demings statistical methods was she able to avoid radical surgery when it simply wasn’t called for.

All businesses and business processes experience waste. Most of the time waste is due to errors or nonconformities in the agreed upon work processes. For some businesses this waste can exceed 40% of the total business expenses. In others it’s as high as 25% of sales.

If we are to ever regain control over medical costs in the USA, we must start with the errors – information errors that lead to procedural errors.