The Journey to Perfection

One of the reoccurring learnings I’ve had this year revolves around judging something new against perfection as opposed to comparing something new against the status quo. I see this over and over in the EHR and Healthcare IT world.

Pairing this idea with the idea in the tweet, I wonder if too often we’re found trying to achieve perfection in healthcare that we are afraid to take the journey to perfection.

I’m chewing on this idea this weekend. What are you thinking about this weekend?

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

1 Comment

  • I will continue to push buttons to get people to realize that they get better outcomes with in-line “best practices” (map out processes, improve them, test them, roll them out so as to facilitate/encourage consistent use, monitor the processes, carry out data analytics to disoover ways and means of updating these processes).

    “Perfection” is not one of Russel Ackoff’s listed planning methodologies (optimizing, adaptivizing, satisficing).

    We can optimize processes that have a high component of automation. We can accommodate adaptivizing (i.e. best practices with an override of ad hoc interventions) but in a world of high costs and scarce resources, it seems to me that “satisficing” continues to be all we can afford to do in healthcare.

    At the time Dr Ackoff wrote his books, he figured we did not have the wherewithal for “adaptivizing” – i.e. we did not at that time have ACM/BPM.

    The recent case of a mother from Canada who had medical problems while on vacation in Hawaii and ended up with a $1,000,000 bill for healthcare services that Insurance would not cover, is a good illustration of the ridiculous state of healthcare services delivery.

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