October 17, 2015

New Standard of Excellence


Not often I recommend an article from 2004 to read. But this article by Dr. Atul Gawande leads to a new standard of excellence. Anyone with a basic statics education is familiar with the bell curve. Most medicine is successful in the middle of the curve. Sometimes treatment at the low end of the curve.

Dr. Warren Warwick’s example at the end of the article shows how you get off the chart medical treatment of cystic fibrosis. He made a study of what it takes to do better than everyone else. He believed that excellence came from seeing, on a daily basis, the difference between being 99.5-per-cent successful and being 99.95-per-cent successful. Warwick’s combination of focus, aggressiveness, and inventiveness is what makes him extraordinary.

“What the best may have, above all, is a capacity to learn and adapt—and to do so faster than everyone else.”

The question is why do you want to be extraordinary?

What are you doing today to get there?

Are you in Dr. Warwick’s territory?

The Bell Curve
What happens when patients find out how good their doctors really are?
The New Yorker


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