our own system

One of CareMore’s critical insights was the application of an old systems-management principle first developed at Bell Labs in the 1930s and refined by the management guru W. Edwards Deming in the 1950s: you can fix a problem at step one for $1, or fix it at step 10 for $30. The American health-care system is repair-centric, not prevention-centric. We wait for train wrecks and then clean up the damage. What would happen if we prevented the train wrecks in the first place? The doctors at CareMore decided to find out.

CareMore is awesome. Healthcare delivery doesn’t suffer from a shortage of ideas, or even a shortage of ideas that work, it suffers from unwillingness. I love when interventions that demand more staff and more tools and more effort work. By “work” I mean financially beneficial to providers. Sooner or later the powers that be will know it too and the incentives will begin to shift.