High Output Failure by Stephen A. Vaughn MD PhD
Regarding administrators – look at how militaries act on the field. Military staffing measures the number of support personnel to the number of combat troops. The target is about 1:7. The North Koreans and the Vietnamese against the French made do with an incredible 1:2 or even 1:1 support/combat. In the current US military, I understand it’s 30:1, which is often seen in bloated administrations.
If the analogy is extended to medicine – if 1 physician has 1 support person on their back, that’s a 50% productivity. If it’s 30:1, that’s 3% productivity. There’s no way to sustain that- it’s high-output failure.
Agree completely. Just wanted to make it clear that WHO is not the bad guy here: we’re completely capable of screwing ourselves.
Hello ICD-10. Thanks a lot WHO, you worthless &*#%$^@ ‘s.
I know it’s fun to hate on WHO – kind of furrin and UNish – but their version of IOCD-10 is quite flexible and simple. The governments of most other countries have designed their own versions of ICD-10 that generally contain about the same or fewer codes as our ICD-9. It’s only the good old USA that vomited up the 64K code monstrosity that’s being forced up our asses.
Hey, good for them, and no, no surprise at all that our own government would take a bad idea and expand on it.
But so what? Why should any U.S. physician have to spend any extra time or money complying with a “world” system? There is no justification for our government to impose any coding system on physicians once foolishly regarded as private citizens. Worse still, our government should never have used the sanction of the WHO as a basis for ramming something down our throats.