There was an article making the rounds here on HN about medical checklists, similar to what pilots use for takeoff and landing procedures, for example. Can't remember good keywords to search for, though...
I like the quote from the doctor doing a lot of the work with checklists, answering a question about when they will be widely adopted in medicine:
“At the current rate, it will never happen,” [Pronovost] said, as monitors beeped in the background. “The fundamental problem with the quality of American medicine is that we’ve failed to view delivery of health care as a science. The tasks of medical science fall into three buckets. One is understanding disease biology. One is finding effective therapies. And one is insuring those therapies are delivered effectively. That third bucket has been almost totally ignored by research funders, government, and academia. It’s viewed as the art of medicine. That’s a mistake, a huge mistake. And from a taxpayer’s perspective it’s outrageous.”
As a side note, I've long advocated developers use checklists during releases and more involved git tasks. Why? The cost of using a checklist is minimal-- maybe a few moments glancing at a sheet of paper. The upside is huge though, since you can avoid catastrophic error.
I was fortunate enough to earn my wings before becoming a developer, and as lame as it sounds, learning when and where to use checklists is one of the best lessons I learned.
Another example of doctors advocating checklists.