Favorite Quotes
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." - HL Mencken
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"I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand." - Confucius
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"The good physician treats the disease; the great physician treats the patient who has the disease" - Sir William Osler
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" The best test of a person's character is how he or she treats those with less power." - Bob Sutton
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"Those are my principles, and if you don't like them - well, I have others." - Groucho Marx
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"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein
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"It is hard enough to remember my opinions, without also remembering my reasons for them" - Friedrich Nietzsche
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"Anyone can make the simple complicated. Creativity is making the complicated simple." - Charles Mingus
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"Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted." - Albert Einstein
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"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesman and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
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"This ain't no party, this ain't no disco, this ain't no fooling around." - Talking Heads, Life During Wartime
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"What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbour. This is the whole Torah; all the rest is commentary. Go and learn it." - Hillel, Talmud, Shabbath 31a
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"You will never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing." - Thomas Sowell
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"An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup." - HL Mencken
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"If you only have a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail." - Abraham Maslow
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"A great teacher is one who realizes that he himself is also a student and whose goal is not to dictate the answers, but to stimulate his students creativity enough so that they go out and find the answers themselves." - Herbie Hancock
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"There are no facts, only interpretations." - Nietzsche
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"An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you do know and what you don't." - Anatole France
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"In character, in manner, in style, in all things, the supreme excellence is simplicity." - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ====
Nov - 15
Dec - 19
Jan - 21
Feb - 8
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Quality – I find a kindred spirit
12 Jun2009
I justed tweeted about this blogger’s analysis of the Gawande piece. In his rant, he links to this wonderful discourse on quality – Is this Really How We Should Measure Quality?
This quote echoes many rants on this blog:
And this is the larger point. Our health care is organized in a way that systematically undervalues the thinking, processing and deciding aspects of medicine- the things that really matter to you when you’re a patient who is sick trying to get help. Our system treats medicine as an assembly-line process amenable to assembly-line metrics. But it’s not.
Doctors, like others in professions requiring judgment and reflection, need time to think, and ought to be judged by how well they do that. Since the leading cause of misdiagnosis is a failure of synthesis – a failure by the doctor to put together available information in a way that leads them to the right conclusion – our system ought to be built around helping make sure this happens each and every time.
So, instead of a web site where you could see how often a medical practice does chlamydia screenings, imagine you could find out how often doctors at a hospital got their patients the right diagnosis and treatment? Now that would be a useful way to measure quality.
This analysis as obvious to practicing physicians, but apparently not to suits, researchers, pundits, politicians and insurance leaders. Please have everyone you know read this entry.
Related posts:
- What is quality – a reader asks
- Can we measure quality using outcomes?
- Can we measure quality?
- The danger of bureaucratic rules
- How to insure quality
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
- In: Medical Rants
3 Responses to Quality – I find a kindred spirit
Evan Falchuk
June 12th, 2009 at 8:26 pm
Thanks for the kind words about my posts and for talking about them here. I’m always thrilled to find people who share these views. You’re right, they should be obvious, but they’re not!
I’m enjoying your blog, and look forward to reading more.
Cheers,
Evan Falchuk
Quality – I find a kindred spirit
June 12th, 2009 at 10:59 pm
[...] View post: Quality – I find a kindred spirit [...]
JPB
June 13th, 2009 at 6:41 pm
Then you have the docs who are ordering tests just because they can, regardless of the person having any symptoms. What does an ordinary person do when confronted with that? (And yes, I have encountered that and been bullied. All I can say is “Yikes!”)