This PBS interview with Dr. Kim Yong Kim made some very interesting points about the delivery of health services. Dr Kim has spent much of his career working on the health of the very poor (he has played a lead role in Partners For Health) and was recently appointed President of Dartmouth College.
Here is the part of the interview that stood out for me:
BILL MOYERS: What do you mean, complexity of [health care] delivery?
DR. JIM YONG KIM: Well, just think about a single patient. So a patient comes into the hospital. There’s a judgment made the minute that patient walks into the emergency room about how sick that person is. And then there are relays of information from the triage nurse to the physician, from the physician to the other physician, who comes on the shift.
From them to the ward team, that takes over that patient. There’s so many just transfers of information. You know, we haven’t looked at that transfer of information the way that, for example, Southwest Airlines has. Apparently they do it better than any other company in the world.
BILL MOYERS: Computers?
DR. JIM YONG KIM: No, they have taken seriously the human science of how you transfer simple information from one person to the next. And in medical school, and in the hospitals that I’ve worked in, we’ve done it ad hoc. Sometimes we do it well. Sometimes we don’t do it well. But what we know is that transfer of information is critical. Now to me, again, that’s the rocket science. That’s the human rocket science of how you make health care systems work well.
Understanding, supporting and enhancing those transfers of information looks like a good opportunity for librarians to work on. Dr Kim also observes that simply adding more technology does not solve the problem. Careful observation of the information flows involved by knowledge management staff could be productive here. Marrying insights from psychology with our own knowledge of how people use information could produce some valuable insights. Better handling of information could also improve the quality of the experience (i.e. no more answering the same basic questions over and over again).
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