Atul Gawande
Editor's Note: We'll be running the article recommendations of our friends at TNR Reader each afternoon on The Plank, just in time to print out or save for your commute home. Enjoy! Michael Bloomberg has a next act: He is going to be the mayor of the world. NY Mag | 15 min (3, 804 words) READ MORE >>
The Logistical Sublime
The Infinity of Lists: An Illustrated Essay By Umberto Eco Translated by Alastair McEwen (Rizzoli, 408 pp., $45) The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right By Atul Gawande (Metropolitan Books, 209 pp., $24.50) READ MORE >>
The Logistical Sublime
The Infinity of Lists: An Illustrated Essay By Umberto Eco Translated by Alastair McEwen (Rizzoli, 408 pp., $45) The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right By Atul Gawande (Metropolitan Books, 209 pp., $24.50) READ MORE >>
Good Health Care for Less Money? Yup, Still Possible.
[Guest post by Jonathan Cohn] Advocates for health care reform (including yours truly) have frequently argued that it is possible to reduce the amount of care without reducing the quality--or, to put it more simply, that less care doesn't have to equal worse care. READ MORE >>
A Few Tricks in His Doctor's Bag
As some of you you may have noticed, I took a short vacation after President Obama signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act passed. It seems that Obama and his advisers didn't. With the ink on the presidential signature barely dry, administration officials announced that Don Berwick would be the president's choice to run the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services. READ MORE >>
Owned
Disinfected
Health professionals spend many thousands of hours training to cure disease. But they can learn how to stop the spread of deadly hospital infections in just a few minutes, by learning five steps for putting lines (that is, tubes) into patients’ bodies. Wash your hands. Clean the patient’s skin with chlorhexidine, a special antiseptic. Cover the patient fully in sterile drapes. Don full protective gear, including mask and gown. Add a sterile covering to the site afterwards. READ MORE >>
How The Health Care System Is Like The Subprime Mess
Last night I finally had a chance to read Atul Gawande's terrific New Yorker piece about health care costs, which everyone is READ MORE >>
Punishing The Guilty
Atul Gawande has a fine piece in this week's New Yorker which describes some of the conditions in U.S. prisons, specifically the conditions of prisoners who end up in solitary confinement. Gawande's thesis is that human beings are social creatures who face extreme psychological distress when confronted with a complete lack of human-to-human contact. In fact, Gawande makes the case that such conditions can plausibly be called torture. READ MORE >>
