ARAMARK Healthcare sponsored Dr. Atul Gawande at last weeks AHA Leadership Summit, and he spoke to a packed house after being introduced by our own Dr. Brian Poplin. We were very proud to have been able to sponsor someone who has had such an impact on healthcare. What was most insightful was his comparison of the shift that is needed from COWBOYS to PIT CREWS. He really was highlighting how the current environment needs to shift from specific skills to systems or said another way, from individuals to highly coordinated teams. He even gave us strategies to do that, namely:
- The ability to recognize failure and success for patients. That means the ability to use data—collecting it, refining it, and most importantly understanding.
- Devise solutions. He spent some time talking about checklists in Healthcare, for instance.
- Scaling solutions so that everyone functions together seamlessly like a pit crew.
As I think about the work ARAMARK Healthcare team members do, it is a lot like that of a pit crew. You could liken the hospital to the race car itself, and the race car drivers may be the docs, nurses, and members of the care team. Support service workers at hospitals are the ones making sure that they can perform to the best of their ability—that’s what support is all about.
The parallels continue even with the strategy of devising solutions and using checklists to do that. At ARAMARK Healthcare, we have an entire system of standards and processes for each of our services. And we even have what looks like a checklist for each operation to make sure that we are reducing operational variation and maximizing efficiencies for our services.
There’s no question that the environment is changing rapidly—whether its healthcare reform, medicine itself, technology—you name it. With things moving faster and faster, the analogy of the Pit Crew is spot on.
