[maxerickson]

This article is by the same author:

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/12/10/the-checklist

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.”