Will Rogers said once that “Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.”   With recent events in the transplant world, his message seems eerily prescient.  We recently saw the first successful xenotransplant in the US , and with it a myriad of publications subtly (and not so subtly) touting it as the “future of transplant.” It’s not that surprising the hype cycle has ramped up so quickly around this event.  Xenotransplants have all the key in

I’ve been in the healthcare industry long enough to know that there are a lot of policies and processes out there that are just plain bad. I’m not saying they’re wrong or right or even inefficient or costly. I’m saying they’re bad. Like leftover food in the fridge bad. And it gets worse. Because the longer those leftovers sit there, the more they stink. Granted, today’s now-stinky processes were almost certainly the right choice at one time. But isn’t that always the case? As

H.L. Mencken once wrote, “… there is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong.” Now, more than a hundred years later, and it’s still obvious that Mencken knew what the heck he was talking about. For example, in the 10+ years I’ve spent helping build residency programs, I’ve heard my share of overly simplified theories about what is behind the perpetual shortage of physicians. The one that people are most likely to cough up is, “Reside

There’s one short statement that we hear all the time, and we’ve quickly come to see it as the seven worst words in all of healthcare: “Because we’ve always done it that way.” Just stop for a moment and consider: How much of your daily frustrations are tied to things that have been in place for years? How much time do you spend working around  processes that are clearly broken? And how often do you hear “We have to do it that way because that’s the way we’ve always done it” i