Unhealthy Obsessions with Statistics

Stats are great, line graphs, bar graphs, and pie charts can be magnificent things. But what happens when the interpretations of these numbers becomes the central focus of an organization? It seems to me they become increasingly more important to people when the organization goals are vague and unclear. Perhaps these stats give us some hope that we are still working towards something, or in many cases used by politicians or other officials to convince people they have made that 'change' they were hired for.

Alberta Health Services puts a great deal of emphasis on these numbers that to some are very arbitrary and can be so subjective that they border on meaningless. Yet and incredible amount of tax dollars and energy go into analyzing stats to death (no pun intended). Meanwhile we continue to tinker with the minor surface stuff hoping for a little spike in the line graph or a slightly bigger piece of pie in one are or other. But what happens if we just plain suck at delivering healthcare? What if the whole delivery model is complete garbage? Will the graphs tell us this if we are comparing last months crappy ER wait times to this months slightly less crappy ER wait times?

Let's compare healthcare to search engines in the 90s. Did anyone realize that internet search sucked? What if Google had simply tinkered a little with what the existing search engines did. You know, instead of having a giant ugly banners on the left let's try it on the right. Or instead of having 47 categories in red we try blue lettering instead and see if there is a 1% or 2% change in traffic? No, they just completely trashed conventional search and focused on something simple that worked. They had other products and there were plenty of areas that needed innovation but it was like they went back and re-invented the wheel (search). What would happen if public healthcare took this approach? What if public healthcare just focused on delivering the most basic and emergency services, allowing the marketplace to pick up the other services. This is a scary thought for some that call this idea 2-tiered healthcare, but what happens when the system is bankrupt and there isn't even money to deliver the basic services?

In Alberta as well as in the US now healthcare is going in 36 different directions, some wanting even more focus prevention and healthy living, more studies, more funding, changes to education, and of course an unhealthy obsession with statistics. Are we going to keep tinkering with a system that has proven to suck? Maybe we can bring those 9 hour wait times to 8 hours and 25 minutes if we get that new Senior Directive of Slightly Less Crappy Wait Times? Or perhaps our expectations of publicly funded healthcare needs to change in North America if we want a lean sustainable system that will be in the black when we hand it over to our kids.