Applying Lessons from Data-Driven Baseball to Health Care -- by Suzanne Delbanco, Ph.D.

Unlikely co-authors Billy Beane, Newt Gingrich and John Kerry published an opinion piece in the New York Times on Friday, October 24, 2008 stressing that our health care system would benefit from the intense data collection and analysis that has driven transformative success in professional baseball.  “Number-crunchers now routinely use statistics to put better teams on the field for less money.  Our overpriced, underperforming health care system needs a similar revolution.”

 

Using data on both typical and more obscure statistics, the authors suggest, allows baseball teams to determine when “an attempted steal is worth the risk,” and which players should be drafted and in what order.  They argue that doctors have more ready access to statistics to make decisions about their fantasy baseball teams than for decisions about the care they provide to their patients.

 

There certainly are specific examples of where using statistics in medicine has saved lives.  The opinion article cites the compiling of statistics by the Cochrane Collaborative as the spark to drive improvements in the use of corticosteroids for women at risk of preterm birth. 

 

But such examples are too few and far between.  A study by RAND published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2003 revealed that patients with the thirteen most common chronic conditions receive evidence-based care only 55% of the time. 

 

Similarly, hand hygiene is proven to help prevent hospital-acquired infections, but adherence nationally to hand hygiene protocols hovers under the half-way mark around 40%, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

 

Beane, Gingrich and Kerry conclude that “The best way to start improving quality and lowering costs is to study the stats.”  Arrowsight's Hospital Video Auditing provides a deep analysis of hand hygiene compliance day by day, hour by hour, patient room by patient room, and provides health care workers with the insights they need to improve.  Going back to the power of the authors’ baseball analogy, it’s no accident that Arrowsight Medical describes itself as “game film for health care.”

 

Suzanne Delbanco is President, Health Care Division, Arrowsight, Inc.