Why do you so handily dismiss the article without addressing its content? He is bringing 'expensive' care to people who would otherwise be ignored and making more money to boot. He is doing this by being more efficient, distributed, modular, small and optimizing details right down to architecture and construction. In a world where a large chunk still die from trivial diseases, it is clear current methods do not scale. If this model can safely serve more people, more cheaply and is more profitable then it surely is worth trying. Our current approach to healthcare certainly could do with more efficiency. He states in the article that charity does not scale, even if that is the case, a more efficient healthcare system also improves the efficiency of charity by multiplying how far each unit of currency goes. Is that not what HN is about?
There is probably an Amdahl's Law style limit to this approach where certain expensive specialty care does not benefit from this type of parallelization. But much of the world is not healthy enough to have those as major concerns. Separation may be useful there too, perhaps prices for many treatments are inflated from too much coupling of services? We won't know without experimenting.
As for your link, I believe this is exacerbated by combining highly sterilized environments with sloppy practices. If people are in and out as quick as possible, and only key areas are kept highly sterile this may actually be a bonus. More practice from high throughput aslo drills checklists. A quick google suggests 2% mortality rate and 3% H-aI. Even if padded, looking at his stats - 15,000 surgeries performed and operating since 2001; if it were really so bad I suspect complaints would be much more forceful and he would not be so profitable. Being profit motivated and no frills gives incentives to pay attention to waste, errors and quicker reaction time in dealing with those.
There is probably an Amdahl's Law style limit to this approach where certain expensive specialty care does not benefit from this type of parallelization. But much of the world is not healthy enough to have those as major concerns. Separation may be useful there too, perhaps prices for many treatments are inflated from too much coupling of services? We won't know without experimenting.
As for your link, I believe this is exacerbated by combining highly sterilized environments with sloppy practices. If people are in and out as quick as possible, and only key areas are kept highly sterile this may actually be a bonus. More practice from high throughput aslo drills checklists. A quick google suggests 2% mortality rate and 3% H-aI. Even if padded, looking at his stats - 15,000 surgeries performed and operating since 2001; if it were really so bad I suspect complaints would be much more forceful and he would not be so profitable. Being profit motivated and no frills gives incentives to pay attention to waste, errors and quicker reaction time in dealing with those.