4 ms·

May be the next medical breakthrough is really going to be TODO lists. Which reminds me of Lotus Notes. 20 years ago it widely used to automate workflows. But

• maxerickson 10y ago
  You've heard of The Checklist Manifesto? Medicine features in it.
• ddeck 10y ago
  It already is: From: The effects of safety checklists in medicine: a systematic review: [1] Safety checklists appear to be effective tools for improving patient safety in various clinical settings by strengthening compliance with guidelines, improving human factors, reducing the incidence of adverse events, and decreasing mortality and morbidity. None of the included studies reported negative effects on safety. [1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24116973 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24116973
  • derefr 10y ago
    To me, this is a generalization of the benefit of software/automation: what we're really discovering is that when we force people to think through all the edge-cases in a process in order to explain that process to something as dumb as a computer—or a checklist—we dig up a lot of implicit institutional knowledge that, crucially, not everyone has. (Everybody that had it just assumed everyone else knew!) The result of such a process can be a checklist, or a workflow diagram, or a program. The form of it isn't really important, so much as the fact that the business logic being applied (by a human or a computer) to each case now embeds all the previously-scattered knowledge of the domain explicitly, making each node applying it behave as the union of its institution's knowledge-bases, rather than as the intersection of those knowledge-bases.
    • tormeh 10y ago
      Also, a checklist doesn't get tired and forget a step.
• Zigurd 10y ago
  Protocol books formalize checklists for ER medicine, over-the-phone triage, etc.