HEALTHY ONLINE

While grappling with the costs and imperfections of our health care system in recent years, a multitude of experts in the field found it useful and enlightening to compare health care to a variety of more familiar industries, and to suggest that health care should adopt operational models that have been shown to work well in those other industries. From the financial industry, we learned that health care must be computerized. From the restaurant industry, we learned that health care must be standardized. Observing Starbucks, we concluded that clinicians must be taught a few things about customer service. Aviation brought us safety manuals for medical procedures, and NASCAR informed us about the superior power of disciplined teams of workers. The history of agriculture provided important lessons on government’s role in creating bigger and more efficient producers, and from the history of manufacturing we learned everything else we needed to know, from Six Sigma to Lean Toyota to focused...

Did you ever read a seemingly inconsequential sentence somewhere and it then just refused to leave your mind for days on end, triggering avalanches of thoughts way beyond the original intent, if there even was one? It just happened to me a few days ago when I read one more industry article about the recent Medicare data dump. The following remark was attributed to a primary care doctor: “The U.S. is entering an era of more accountability and transparency in all aspects of people's personal and professional lives and “medicine cannot be excluded,” he said”.  Back in 1996 a science fiction author by the name of David Brin, published an article in Wired Magazine , where he too prophetically argued that the era of transparency is no longer preventable. Ignoring an entire branch of physics, Mr. Brin suggested that the only antidote to the floodlights shining on each individual consists of a “flashlight” we can use to point at the elites running the lightshows. But Mr. Brin forgot anoth...