Doctors Don't Know How Healthcare Works. Here's Why.

I took a job at the National Academies and the National Academy of Medicine.

So if you're not familiar with this organization, it is it's kind of a big deal for people in this field.

This is a nongovernmental organization that is like still relies heavily on government funding.

But basically, it is a body that is nonpartisan and that convenes expert committees to provide like really well-informed, serious opinions on any issue related to medicine, science, engineering.

There's like a bunch of different parts of this organization.

If you've heard of them before in this world, you probably remember there was a report called To Err Is Human that shed light on medical errors as a major cause of morbidity and mortality in this country.

That was like a really landmark study that made a big splash.

But there's lots of examples of this in health care.

So I was actually a part of the same organization that wrote that report to Err Is Human.

And so my major project that I worked on was basically a follow on to that in this long series.

And it was called Vital Signs.

colon, core metrics for health and healthcare progress.

And I think that the fact, so I basically, this report was supposed to be about if we want to measure the health of our nation, not just our health system, not just strictly public health in the way that we think of it today, but if we wanted to have like a dashboard of measures for like, this is how we can tell if we collectively with all the players involved as like a healthcare system that takes care of this nation, are we Any good place? Are we making progress? Because the reality of what we have right now, like the problem that this was trying to address is everyone's measuring like a billion things.

OK, like every hospital's got its metrics.

Every like safety organization has its reporting requirements.

Obviously, the government has a huge amount of reporting requirements, but it's all over the place.

It's not interoperable.

It's not comparable.

And as a result, it's really not that useful.

So we've like tremendous resources being put towards this problem of how to measure the health care system.

But it's not very useful because it cannot be easily compared and contrasted.

It cannot be easily integrated.

So I spent like Between two and three years of this organization and like the biggest chunk of that time was on this project.

I ended up getting promoted to run it by the end.

And it was it was like a really it was a big, important experience for me.

I took a job at the National Academies and the National Academy of Medicine.

So if you're not familiar with this organization, it is it's kind of a big deal for people in this field.

This is a nongovernmental organization that is like still relies heavily on government funding.

But basically, it is a body that is nonpartisan and that convenes expert committees to provide like really well-informed, serious opinions on any issue related to medicine, science, engineering.

There's like a bunch of different parts of this organization.

If you've heard of them before in this world, you probably remember there was a report called To Err Is Human that shed light on medical errors as a major cause of morbidity and mortality in this country.

That was like a really landmark study that made a big splash.

But there's lots of examples of this in health care.

So I was actually a part of the same organization that wrote that report to Err Is Human.

And so my major project that I worked on was basically a follow on to that in this long series.

And it was called Vital Signs.

colon, core metrics for health and healthcare progress.

And I think that the fact, so I basically, this report was supposed to be about if we want to measure the health of our nation, not just our health system, not just strictly public health in the way that we think of it today, but if we wanted to have like a dashboard of measures for like, this is how we can tell if we collectively with all the players involved as like a healthcare system that takes care of this nation, are we Any good place? Are we making progress? Because the reality of what we have right now, like the problem that this was trying to address is everyone's measuring like a billion things.

OK, like every hospital's got its metrics.

Every like safety organization has its reporting requirements.

Obviously, the government has a huge amount of reporting requirements, but it's all over the place.

It's not interoperable.

It's not comparable.

And as a result, it's really not that useful.

So we've like tremendous resources being put towards this problem of how to measure the health care system.

But it's not very useful because it cannot be easily compared and contrasted.

It cannot be easily integrated.

So I spent like Between two and three years of this organization and like the biggest chunk of that time was on this project.

I ended up getting promoted to run it by the end.

And it was it was like a really it was a big, important experience for me.