What Healthcare Can Learn From Apple

Last week Becker’s Hospital Review reporter Helen Adamopoulos published a feature story on what hospitals and health systems can learn from Google when it comes to employee engagement. The article, “The Google Approach: How Hospitals Can Create Cultures That Drive Employee Engagement” explores Google’s commitment to employee engagement, explaining how both employee benefits and a culture of engagement help the organization recruit and retain the best and brightest.
The article got me thinking about a comment made by Sir Liam Donaldson earlier this year at a patient safety conference I attended in California. Sir Donaldson, if you’re not aware, was England’s chief medical officer, leading the country’s National Health System. He was knighted in 2010 in recognition of his work and is one of the world’s biggest advocates of patient safety and reducing medical error.
During his remarks, Sir Donaldson said healthcare workers needed to function more like Apple engineers. These passionate engineers are responsible for remarkable discoveries, creating products never even thought possible, driven by a “fascination with doing things thought impossible to do.”
There was never an acceptance that some things were simply unachievable. Unfortunately, many healthcare organizations are plagued with an underlying belief that limits achievement.
As Michael Langberg, MD, senior vice president of medical affairs and CMO at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles explained in a recent interview, “Many people believed [errors] were just a necessary part of being cared for in a complex environment, and we had to break through that way of thinking.”
Cedars-Sinai’s leaders pushed its physicians and staff not to accept the idea of inevitable error. By changing the mindset from reducing to eliminating error, the organization achieved a reduction in healthcare-associated infections it previously thought was unattainable.
Sir Donaldson, I have no doubt, would promote a mindset similar to that of Cedars-Sinai: Error isn’t inevitable; it can be eliminated.