Wonderful long article at the New Yorker regarding some changes being made at Hospitals. Changes that are very similar to kitchen operations at the Cheesecake Factory.
From Atul Gawande writing at The New Yorker:
Big Med
It was Saturday night, and I was at the local Cheesecake Factory with my two teen-age daughters and three of their friends. You may know the chain: a hundred and sixty restaurants with a catalogue-like menu that, when I did a count, listed three hundred and eight dinner items (including the forty-nine on the "Skinnylicious" menu), plus a hundred and twenty-four choices of beverage. It's a linen-napkin-and-tablecloth sort of place, but with something for everyone. There's wine and wasabi-crusted ahi tuna, but there's also buffalo wings and Bud Light. The kids ordered mostly comfort food - pot stickers, mini crab cakes, teriyaki chicken, Hawaiian pizza, pasta carbonara. I got a beet salad with goat cheese, white-bean hummus and warm flatbread, and the miso salmon.
The place is huge, but it's invariably packed, and you can see why. The typical entre is under fifteen dollars. The decor is fancy, in an accessible, Disney-cruise-ship sort of way: faux Egyptian columns, earth-tone murals, vaulted ceilings. The waiters are efficient and friendly. They wear all white (crisp white oxford shirt, pants, apron, sneakers) and try to make you feel as if it were a special night out. As for the food - can I say this without losing forever my chance of getting a reservation at Per Se? - it was delicious.
The chain serves more than eighty million people per year. I pictured semi-frozen bags of beet salad shipped from Mexico, buckets of precooked pasta and production-line hummus, fish from a box. And yet nothing smacked of mass production. My beets were crisp and fresh, the hummus creamy, the salmon like butter in my mouth. No doubt everything we ordered was sweeter, fattier, and bigger than it had to be. But the Cheesecake Factory knows its customers. The whole table was happy (with the possible exception of Ethan, aged sixteen, who picked the onions out of his Hawaiian pizza).
I wondered how they pulled it off. I asked one of the Cheesecake Factory line cooks how much of the food was premade. He told me that everything's pretty much made from scratch - except the cheesecake, which actually is from a cheesecake factory, in Calabasas, California.
I'd come from the hospital that day. In medicine, too, we are trying to deliver a range of services to millions of people at a reasonable cost and with a consistent level of quality. Unlike the Cheesecake Factory, we haven't figured out how. Our costs are soaring, the service is typically mediocre, and the quality is unreliable. Every clinician has his or her own way of doing things, and the rates of failure and complication (not to mention the costs) for a given service routinely vary by a factor of two or three, even within the same hospital.
It's easy to mock places like the Cheesecake Factory - restaurants that have brought chain production to complicated sit-down meals. But the casual dining sector, as it is known, plays a central role in the ecosystem of eating, providing three-course, fork-and-knife restaurant meals that most people across the country couldn't previously find or afford. The ideas start out in elite, upscale restaurants in major cities. You could think of them as research restaurants, akin to research hospitals. Some of their enthusiasms - miso salmon, Chianti-braised short ribs, flourless chocolate espresso cake - spread to other high-end restaurants. Then the casual-dining chains re-engineer them for affordable delivery to millions. Does health care need something like this?
And the answer? YES! Dr. Gawande (an Md.) goes on to describe several examples of the factory management techniques being implemented in some hospital chains and their results. Yes, every person is different but there is a lot that can be standardized. The documentation shows that the patient experience improved, the cost of medical care decreased and the recovery was faster. A fun read. Dr. Gawande closes with this observation:
The critical question is how soon that sort of quality and cost control will be available to patients everywhere across the country. We've let health-care systems provide us with the equivalent of greasy-spoon fare at four-star prices, and the results have been ruinous. The Cheesecake Factory model represents our best prospect for change. Some will see danger in this. Many will see hope. And that's probably the way it should be.
