by Atul Gawande
Know-how and sophistication have increased remarkably across almost all our realms of endeavor, and as a result so has our struggle to deliver on them. You see it in the frequent mistakes authorities make when hurricanes or tornadoes or other disasters hit. You see it in the 36 percent increase between 2004 and 2007 in lawsuits against attorneys for legal mistakes--the most common being simple administrative errors, like missed calendar dates and clerical screw ups, as well as errors in applying the law. You see it in flawed software design, in foreign intelligence failures, in our tottering banks--in fact, in almost any endeavor requiring mastery of complexity and of large amounts of knowledge.
Such failures carry an emotional valence that seems to cloud how we think about them. Failures of ignorance we can forgive. If the knowledge of the best thing to do in a given situation does not exist, we are happy to have people simply make their best effort. But if the knowledge exists and is not applied correctly, it is difficult not to be infuriated. What do you mean half of heart attack patients don't get their treatment on time? What do you mean that two-thirds of death penalty cases are overturned because of errors? It is not for nothing that the philosophers gave these failures so unmerciful a name--ineptitude. Those on the receiving end use other words, like negligence or even heartlessness.
For those who do the work, however--for those who care for the patients, practice the law, respond when need calls--the judgment feels like it ignores how extremely difficult the job is. Every day there is more and more to manage and get right and learn. And defeat under conditions of complexity occurs far more often despite great effort rather than from a lack of it. That's why the traditional solution in most professions has not been to punish failure but instead to encourage more experience and training.
There can be no disputing the importance of experience. It is not enough for a surgeon to have the textbook knowledge of how to treat trauma victims--to understand the science of penetrating wounds, the damage they cause, the different approaches to diagnosis and treatment, the importance of acting quickly. One must also grasp the clinical reality, with its nuances of timing and sequence. One needs practice to achieve mastery, a body of experience before one achieves real success. And if what we are missing when we fail is individual skill, then what is needed is simply more training and practice.
But what is striking about John's cases is that he is among the best-trained surgeons I know, with more than a decade on the front lines. And this is the common pattern. The capability of individuals is not proving to be our primary difficulty, whether in medicine or elsewhere. Far from it. Training in most fields is longer and more intense than ever. People spend years of sixty-, seventy-, eighty-hour weeks building their base of knowledge and experience before going out into practice on their own--whether they are doctors or professors or lawyers or engineers. They have sought to perfect themselves. It is not clear how we could produce substantially more expertise than we already have. Yet our failures remain frequent. They persist despite remarkable individual ability.
Here, then, is our situation at the start of the twenty-first century: We have accumulated stupendous know-how. We have put it in the hands of some of the most highly trained, highly skilled, and hardworking people in our society. And, with it, they have indeed accomplished extraordinary things. Nonetheless, that know-how is often unmanageable. Avoidable failures are common and persistent, not to mention demoralizing and frustrating, across many fields--from medicine to finance, business to government. And the reason is increasingly evident: the volume and complexity of what we know has exceeded our individual ability to deliver its benefits correctly, safely, or reliably. Knowledge has both saved us and burdened us.
That means we need a different strategy for overcoming failure, one that builds on experience and takes advantage of the knowledge people have but somehow also makes up for our inevitable human inadequacies. And there is such a strategy--though it will seem almost ridiculous in its simplicity, maybe even crazy to those of us who have spent years carefully developing ever more advanced skills and technologies.
It is a checklist.
*Identifying details were changed at John's request.
1. THE PROBLEM OF EXTREME COMPLEXITY
Some time ago I read a case report in the Annals of Thoracic Surgery. It was, in the dry prose of a medical journal article, the story of a nightmare. In a small Austrian town in the Alps, a mother and father had been out on a walk in the woods with their three-year-old daughter. The parents lost sight of the girl for a moment and that was all it took. She fell into an icy fishpond. The parents frantically jumped in after her. But she was lost beneath the surface for thirty minutes before they finally found her on the pond bottom. They pulled her to the surface and got her to the shore. Following instructions from an emergency response team reached on their cell phone, they began cardiopulmonary resuscitation.
Rescue personnel arrived eight minutes later and took the first recordings of the girl's condition. She was unresponsive. She had no blood pressure or pulse or sign of breathing. Her body temperature was just 66 degrees. Her pupils were dilated and unreactive to light, indicating cessation of brain function. She was gone.
But the emergency technicians continued CPR anyway. A helicopter took her to the nearest hospital, where she was wheeled directly into an operating room, a member of the emergency crew straddling her on the gurney, pumping her chest. A surgical team got her onto a heart-lung bypass machine as rapidly as it could. The surgeon had to cut down through the skin of the child's right groin and sew one of the desk-size machine's silicone rubber tubes into her femoral artery to take the blood out of her, then another into her femoral vein to send the blood back. A perfusionist turned the pump on, and as he adjusted the oxygen and temperature and flow through the system, the clear tubing turned maroon with her blood. Only then did they stop the girl's chest compressions.
Between the transport time and the time it took to plug the machine into her, she had been lifeless for an hour and a half. By the two-hour mark, however, her body temperature had risen almost ten degrees, and her heart began to beat. It was her first organ to come back.
After six hours, the girl's core reached 98.6 degrees, normal body temperature. The team tried to shift her from the bypass machine to a mechanical ventilator, but the pond water and debris had damaged her lungs too severely for the oxygen pumped in through the breathing tube to reach her blood. So they switched her instead to an artificial-lung system known as ECMO--extracorporeal membrane oxygenation. To do this, the surgeons had to open her chest down the middle with a power saw and sew the lines to and from the portable ECMO unit directly into her aorta and her beating heart.
The ECMO machine now took over. The surgeons removed the heart-lung bypass machine tubing. They repaired the vessels and closed her groin incision. The surgical team moved the girl into intensive care, with her chest still open and covered with sterile plastic foil. Through the day and night, the intensive care unit team worked on suctioning the water and debris from her lungs with a fiberoptic bronchoscope. By the next day, her lungs had recovered sufficiently for the team to switch her from ECMO to a mechanical ventilator, which required taking her back to the operating room to unplug the tubing, repair the holes, and close her chest.
Over the next two days, all the girl's organs recovered--her liver, her kidneys, her intestines, everything except her brain. A CT scan showed global brain swelling, which is a sign of diffuse damage, but no actual dead zones. So the team escalated the care one step further. It drilled a hole into the girl's skull, threaded a probe into the brain to monitor the pressure, and kept that pressure tightly controlled through constant adjustments in her fluids and medications. For more than a week, she lay comatose. Then, slowly, she came back to life.
First, her pupils started to react to light. Next, she began to breathe on her own. And, one day, she simply awoke. Two weeks after her accident, she went home. Her right leg and left arm were partially paralyzed. Her
speech was thick and slurry. But she underwent extensive outpatient therapy. By age five, she had recovered her faculties completely. Physical and neurological examinations were normal. She was like any little girl again.
What makes this recovery astounding isn't just the idea that someone could be brought back after two hours in a state that would once have been considered death. It's also the idea that a group of people in a random hospital could manage to pull off something so enormously complicated. Rescuing a drowning victim is nothing like it looks on television shows, where a few chest compressions and some mouth-to-mouth resuscitation always seem to bring someone with waterlogged lungs and a stilled heart coughing and sputtering back to life. To save this one child, scores of people had to carry out thousands of steps correctly: placing the heart-pump tubing into her without letting in air bubbles; maintaining the sterility of her lines, her open chest, the exposed fluid in her brain; keeping a temperamental battery of machines up and running. The degree of difficulty in any one of these steps is substantial. Then you must add the difficulties of orchestrating them in the right sequence, with nothing dropped, leaving some room for improvisation, but not too much.
For every drowned and pulseless child rescued, there are scores more who don't make it--and not just because their bodies are too far gone. Machines break down; a team can't get moving fast enough; someone fails to wash his hands and an infection takes hold. Such cases don't get written up in the Annals of Thoracic Surgery, but they are the norm, though people may not realize it.
I think we have been fooled about what we can expect from medicine--fooled, one could say, by penicillin. Alexander Fleming's 1928 discovery held out a beguiling vision of health care and how it would treat illness or injury in the future: a simple pill or injection would be capable of curing not just one condition but perhaps many. Penicillin, after all, seemed to be effective against an astonishing variety of previously untreatable infectious diseases. So why not a similar cure-all for the different kinds of cancer? And why not something equally simple to melt away skin burns or to reverse cardiovascular disease and strokes?
Medicine didn't turn out this way, though. After a century of incredible discovery, most diseases have proved to be far more particular and difficult to treat. This is true even for the infections doctors once treated with penicillin: not all bacterial strains were susceptible and those that were soon developed resistance. Infections today require highly individualized treatment, sometimes with multiple therapies, based on a given strain's pattern of antibiotic susceptibility, the condition of the patient, and which organ systems are affected. The model of medicine in the modern age seems less and less like penicillin and more and more like what was required for the girl who nearly drowned. Medicine has become the art of managing extreme complexity--and a test of whether such complexity can, in fact, be humanly mastered.
The ninth edition of the World Health Organization's international classification of diseases has grown to distinguish more than thirteen thousand different diseases, syndromes, and types of injury--more than thirteen thousand different ways, in other words, that the body can fail. And, for nearly all of them, science has given us things we can do to help. If we cannot cure the disease, then we can usually reduce the harm and misery it causes. But for each condition the steps are different and they are almost never simple. Clinicians now have at their disposal some six thousand drugs and four thousand medical and surgical procedures, each with different requirements, risks, and considerations. It is a lot to get right.
There is a community clinic in Boston's Kenmore Square affiliated with my hospital. The word clinic makes the place sound tiny, but it's nothing of the sort. Founded in 1969, and now called Harvard Vanguard, it aimed to provide people with the full range of outpatient medical ser vices they might need over the course of their lives. It has since tried to stick with that plan, but doing so hasn't been easy. To keep up with the explosive growth in medical capabilities, the clinic has had to build more than twenty facilities and employ some six hundred doctors and a thousand other health professionals covering fifty-nine specialties, many of which did not exist when the clinic first opened. Walking the fifty steps from the fifth-floor elevator to the general surgery department, I pass offices for general internal medicine, endocrinology, genetics, hand surgery, laboratory testing, nephrology, ophthalmology, orthopedics, radiology scheduling, and urology--and that's just one hallway.
To handle the complexity, we've split up the tasks among various specialties. But even divvied up, the work can become overwhelming. In the course of one day on general surgery call at the hospital, for instance, the labor floor asked me to see a twenty-five-year-old woman with mounting right lower abdominal pain, fever, and nausea, which raised concern about appendicitis, but she was pregnant, so getting a CT scan to rule out the possibility posed a risk to the fetus. A gynecological oncologist paged me to the operating room about a woman with an ovarian mass that upon removal appeared to be a metastasis from pancreatic cancer; my colleague wanted me to examine her pancreas and decide whether to biopsy it. A physician at a nearby hospital phoned me to transfer a patient in intensive care with a large cancer that had grown to obstruct her kidneys and bowel and produce bleeding that they were having trouble controlling. Our internal medicine ser vice called me to see a sixty-one-year-old man with emphysema so severe he had been refused hip surgery because of insufficient lung reserves; now he had a severe colon infection--an acute diverticulitis--that had worsened despite three days of antibiotics, and surgery seemed his only option. Another ser vice asked for help with a fifty-two-year-old man with diabetes, coronary artery disease, high blood pressure, chronic kidney failure, severe obesity, a stroke, and now a strangulating groin hernia. And an internist called about a young, otherwise healthy woman with a possible rectal abscess to be lanced.
Confronted with cases of such variety and intricacy--in one day, I'd had six patients with six completely different primary medical problems and a total of twenty-six different additional diagnoses--it's tempting to believe that no one else's job could be as complex as mine. But extreme complexity is the rule for almost everyone. I asked the people in Harvard Vanguard's medical records department if they would query the electronic system for how many different kinds of patient problems the average doctor there sees annually. The answer that came back flabbergasted me. Over the course of a year of office practice--which, by definition, excludes the patients seen in the hospital--physicians each evaluated an average of 250 different primary diseases and conditions. Their patients had more than nine hundred other active medical problems that had to be taken into account. The doctors each prescribed some three hundred medications, ordered more than a hundred different types of laboratory tests, and performed an average of forty different kinds of office procedures--from vaccinations to setting fractures.
Even considering just the office work, the statistics still didn't catch all the diseases and conditions. One of the most common diagnoses, it turned out, was "Other." On a hectic day, when you're running two hours behind and the people in the waiting room are getting irate, you may not take the time to record the precise diagnostic codes in the database. But, even when you do have the time, you commonly find that the particular diseases your patients have do not actually exist in the computer system.
The software used in most American electronic records has not managed to include all the diseases that have been discovered and distinguished from one another in recent years. I once saw a patient with a ganglioneuroblastoma (a rare type of tumor of the adrenal gland) and another with a nightmarish genetic condition called Li-Fraumeni syndrome, which causes inheritors to develop cancers in organs all over their bodies. Neither disease had yet made it into the pull-down menus. All I could record was, in so many words, "Other." Scientists continue to report important new genetic findings, subtypes of cancer, and other diagnoses--not to mention treatments--almost weekly. The complexity is increasing so fast that even the computers cannot k
eep up.
But it's not only the breadth and quantity of knowledge that has made medicine complicated. It is also the execution--the practical matter of what knowledge requires clinicians to do. The hospital is where you see just how formidable the task can be. A prime example is the place the girl who nearly drowned spent most of her recovery--the intensive care unit.
It's an opaque term, intensive care. Specialists in the field prefer to call what they do critical care, but that still doesn't exactly clarify matters. The nonmedical term life support gets us closer. The damage that the human body can survive these days is as awesome as it is horrible: crushing, burning, bombing, a burst aorta, a ruptured colon, a massive heart attack, rampaging infection. These maladies were once uniformly fatal. Now survival is commonplace, and a substantial part of the credit goes to the abilities intensive care units have developed to take artificial control of failing bodies. Typically, this requires a panoply of technology--a mechanical ventilator and perhaps a tracheostomy tube if the lungs have failed, an aortic balloon pump if the heart has given out, a dialysis machine if the kidneys don't work. If you are unconscious and can't eat, silicone tubing can be surgically inserted into your stomach or intestines for formula feeding. If your intestines are too damaged, solutions of amino acids, fatty acids, and glucose can be infused directly into your bloodstream.
On any given day in the United States alone, some ninety thousand people are admitted to intensive care. Over a year, an estimated five million Americans will be, and over a normal lifetime nearly all of us will come to know the glassed bay of an ICU from the inside. Wide swaths of medicine now depend on the life support systems that ICUs provide: care for premature infants; for victims of trauma, strokes, and heart attacks; for patients who have had surgery on their brains, hearts, lungs, or major blood vessels. Critical care has become an increasingly large portion of what hospitals do. Fifty years ago, ICUs barely existed. Now, to take a recent random day in my hospital, 155 of our almost 700 patients are in intensive care. The average stay of an ICU patient is four days, and the survival rate is 86 percent. Going into an ICU, being put on a mechanical ventilator, having tubes and wires run into and out of you, is not a sentence of death. But the days will be the most precarious of your life.