Steven Lewis's blog

Baseball has spring training and no one is exempt from the drills, the repetitions, the fine tuning, the repetition. It is not just a rite of spring; it is fundamental to the pursuit of excellence. Baseball assumes that skills are impermanent, mastery is fleeting, coaching is essential, and practice never ends. Health care assumes that skills once achieved are permanent, mastery comes with time, coaching is unnecessary, and practice is for students. Baseball has it right.

When performance measurement fails, bad things happen. Figure skating learned that lesson the hard way. Its performance measurement system has evolved from an arbitrary and often corrupt gong show to an increasingly reliable (though still imperfect) science. That it has made progress despite its rigid and hidebound culture is all the more reason for health care to learn from its travails.

Emotional attachments often lead people to overstate the ability and performance of people close to them. Duke Snider, the great Brooklyn Dodger center fielder, was my first sports hero. I thought he was the greatest. He was excellent, but he was only the third best center fielder in New York, after Mantle and Mays (or Mays and Mantle). Coming to grips with the incontrovertible statistical evidence on the relative performance of one's heroes is part of growing up. It's the same in health care: viewing performance through rose-tinted glasses can be harmful to one's health.