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Big Med: Can hospital chains improve the medical industry?
The New Yorker, August 7, 2012
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. 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.
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*MAGNET™, MAGNET RECOGNITION PROGRAM®, and ANCC MAGNET RECOGNITION® are trademarks of the American Nurses Credentialing Center (ANCC). The products and services of HCPro, Inc. and The Greeley Company are neither sponsored nor endorsed by the ANCC. The acronym "MRP" is not a trademark of HCPro or its parent company. HCPro, Inc. is not affiliated in any way with The Joint Commission, which owns the JCAHO (Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations) and Joint Commission trademarks, the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, which owns the ACGME trademark, or the Accreditation Association for Ambulatory Health Care (AAAHC).