Positive deviants

[Guest guest]

My wife told me about this article by Dr. Atul Gawande, a surgeon who writes wonderful articles for New Yorker magazine. It was his commencement address to the Pritzker School of Medicine this year. He told a story about how a friend ran a program to reduce malnutrition in Vietnamese villages, but they had little funding. So instead of the usual methods, they went low-tech and travelled to different villages, identified which families had the best nourished children and then analyzed what they were doing differently from the other families. They were the "positive deviants", the outliers. They took their ideas and spread them to other villages, measured their results and used those results to convince other villages to adopt their methods. As a result, malnutrition dropped 65-85%, which was even more effective than the usual methods suggested by outside experts. Gawande then goes on to explain how the United States is now that village:http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2009/06/atul-gawande-university-of-chicago-medical-school-commencement-address.htmlHe points out that, like the researchers in Vietnam, we need to look for successful outliers if we are to solve our healthcare crisis. But while he zooms in to some degree of some unique models, he doesn't zoom in small enough. I think the "positive deviants" he and the rest of the country are looking for are IMPs.Small, low-overhead, cost-effective practices that have highly satisfied patients and healthcare providers, with reproducible measures of success. Definitely outside the norm. Maybe somebody should write a letter to the editor. Maybe I will. Maybe if a bunch of us write then, like the Whos in Whoville, we might get heard. Comments can be sent to "themail@...". Yopp! SetoSouth Pasadena, CA