After reading Joe De Feo’s July 8, 2011, Quality Digest Daily article, “A Positive Prognosis: Transforming Health Care in America,” I took another look at the wonderful book, Escape Fire (Jossey-Bass, 2003), a compendium of Dr. Donald Berwick’s inspiring plenary speeches at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement’s (IHI) 1992–2002 annual forum. Berwick is probably the leading health care-improvement thinker in the world. He is the former CEO of IHI and, as some of you know, a controversial Obama appointee as head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Administration. In my opinion, he is most definitely the person for the job. As if it wasn’t difficult enough to deal only with health care cultures, he now has the thankless job of integrating messy political agendas into the very serious business of health improvement.
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