Why health care is a Different animal

What an amazing post by Bob Wachter on The Health Care Blog!! It talks about why, compared to other industries, health care is a different animal...with a few similarities of course. Aviation and finance are commonly (and too casually) presumed analogous to health care. Bob really breaks down the thought process of why this isn't the case most of the time but also why this may be a fair analogy some of the time. You need at least a little perspective to work from. Excerpt below.

I continue to find analogies from other industries useful, but we must recognize their limitations. Simple solutions that worked so well in the [fill in the blank] industry often fail in healthcare because our workplace is like a dozen industries rolled into one. For example, a busy hospital and its workers may face these challenges:

• How to move a part (like a pathology specimen) seamlessly down an assembly line, just like Toyota does.
• How to get an important piece of data (like a discharge summary) from place to place, just like FedEx does.
• How to make difficult, weighty decisions (like whether to do open up an abdomen) under conditions of overwhelming uncertainty, just like a field general or a business CEO does.
• How to deal with major and only partly predictable changes in capacity needs (like when the “bus shows up” at 7 pm in the Emergency Department), like McDonalds does at lunchtime.
• How to providing “expectation-surpassing” customer service (so that we ace our Press-Ganey survey), just like the Ritz Carlton or Nordstrom does.
• How to innovate, both with processes and technologies (a consuming interest in an academic medical center like mine), just like Apple does.
• How to teach wildly disparate learners (like the ones on my team when I’m ward attending), just like a high school teacher does (or would do, if her class included freshman, sophomores, juniors and seniors).

Think about it for a second. Can you conjure up another industry that confronts more than two or three of these challenges? I can’t. And not only are all these conditions present simultaneously in most healthcare organizations, there are times when a single doctor or nurse confronts all of them!