

Why Doesn't Medical Care Get Better When Doctors Rest More? - whiddershins
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/08/hospital-residency-hour-limits-problem-with-medical-care.html

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crpatino
Many things right familiar to our IT experience.

1\. From the Mythical Man-Month, as team size (and capacity of productive
work) grows linearly, communication overhead grows quadratically.

2\. Attempts to manage with traditional tools get sidetracked by impossibility
to create standard procedures that account for overwhelming detail and the
need to apply experience, knowledge and raw common sense on every level of
decision.

3\. Do we have some insights to offer? Maybe instead of having lone residents
falling in and out of context over short shift, a solution similar to pair
programming can be implemented. Think of pairs of residents, the fresh one
(less than 6 hours in the shift) doing the driving and the one with more hours
behind providing tactic advise and context for what have happened in the
previous shift. Could such a team eventually take care of (at least) 80% the
work load of the two doctors working independently in parallel?

