The Daily Beast: The Cleveland Clinic, where president Obama went in July to see high-quality, cost-efficient medicine in action, has miniaturized robotic tools that can repair a heart valve through an incision less than an inch long, a computer system that allows doctors to read patients’ charts and write orders from anywhere in the world, and the last word in networked, interactive supply closets.
Any time a nurse takes something from a shelf, it’s recorded by a program that keeps a running count of 350 items in hundreds of locations, and can dispatch a self-guided robot cart to bring replacements from the warehouse. A century after Henry Ford began building cars on an assembly line, Cleveland Clinic has brought that technique to medicine, updated to reflect the latest Japanese-inspired thinking on “lean manufacturing” and “continuous-cycle improvement.” Cleveland Clinic is a hospital trying to be a Toyota factory.
In his efforts to improve the efficiency of medical care, Cleveland Clinic president and CEO Dr. Delos M. Cosgrove, a former cardiac surgeon, has enlisted every tool of modern management, obsessively tracking metrics of performance from blood-bank usage to market share, even redesigning hospital gowns in an initiative to “improve the patient experience.”