New post up over at The Atlantic — Improving US healthcare by looking at strategies from India

Some things are hard to see until one leaves his or her normal surroundings. For American doctors, especially procedure-based doctors, it’s easy to get used to the wastefulness and largesse of delivering care.  Then you travel. You go to another healthcare system and are left to gasp. An AF ablation ‘costs’ 100,000 in the US, while the same procedure in Germany costs 10,000$? It’s cheaper still in India. How could this have happened to us? Can we do better? My wife says it’s burdensome to be clear seeing about some things. She was talking in the context of seeing the folly of futile care at end-of-life. I’m talking about seeing the wastefulness of US healthcare. Everyday, most American doctors walk through beautiful hospital lobbies, attend to patients in luxurious hospital rooms and do procedures with the most expensive equipment. Then we head to the office where we accept our role as data-entry clerks, mindlessly checking boxes on computers–all in the name of providing quality care. Noticing this stuff, and having to just carry on, gets burdensome. But I’m at a point in my life where ambling along without noticing stuff is not possible. A few weeks ago, I read an article in the Washington Post promoting the work of two business professors who had studied 5 successful Indian hospitals. What struck me was the means by which these hospitals achieved quality care at fractions of the cost that we spend. It was all about the how. ...
Source: Dr John M - Category: Cardiology Authors: Source Type: blogs