Moneyball solution to health care?

Interesting piece, but this diary may not be long for the world.

and posting that article, despite the strict anti-politics laws that are placed here. It was a very good read. Without going all political, I think all business, including health care, should use more of a moneyball approach to building their companies.

Things are changing, albeit more slowly than ideal. Basic medical statistical lectures are included from the first year on, most likely as a response to it being placed on the USMLE Step 1 exam (a very hard version of the SAT that covers the first 2 years of medical school). Right now, most of what we learn involves being able to understand the numbers that tell us if a diagnostic test or treatment is effective at what it does. Work by the Cochrane group often shows up.

Unfortunately, with all of the other information that gets thrown at us in the first year, most of this information is viewed as tangential at best by the students. However, if more emphasis was put into it from big picture perspective (new institutes and funding) down to the education level (more time spent working on it), it would not be that hard to change core viewpoints. Medicine in the biomedical science format of the past century forces physicians, especially primary care physicians, to be open to new techniques/treatments/advances. Now they just need to be convinced that how those advances are evaluated are just as important as the actual advances themselves.