Delicious LiveJournal Links for 6-20-2010

[andrewducker]

• The future of medicine
  (tags: medicine healthcare speech complexity organization science)
• How what we know and what we act on aren't always the same.
  (tags: belief knowledge psychology)

Comments

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

There is a huge shift to what's called 'protocol-based care' and 'guideline-based care', across the sector internationally. The drivers in different health systems are different (and the UK and the US perhaps illustrate extremes of insurer-led drivers and the UK government-led drivers), but there are broad similarities.

The idea is that a group of suitably-qualified people develop a protocol or guideline for a particular situation, based on the best available evidence, which usually also includes some measures of cost/benefit analysis (often by proxy). Then health workers simply follow those instructions, unless they have a good reason for departing from the usual process, which they are typically obliged to account for.

There are all sorts of problems with it, but as a tool for deploying very focused intelligence across a huge range of people it's not bad, IMO.

[andrewducker]

Yup - my Dad's been involved in some of this stuff (as a Doctor who was involved in lots of committee work) and another friend is working in this area at the moment, and was showing me videos of how pilots work with checklists and guidelines to try and avoid error-situations (and how they go horribly wrong sometimes).