In a sweeping campaign to improve medical performance, Harvard Medical School’s Dr. Atul Gawande has taken the battle beyond the operating room.

A distinguished surgeon, author and White House advisor, Gawande’s research focuses on reducing deaths, complications and disparities in surgery in the U.S. and abroad. And when he’s not in scrubs or writing his New Yorker column, Gawande directs the World Health Organization’s Global Challenge for Safer Surgical Care. He recently visited NIH to give back-to-back lectures, each to a packed house.

“We all want medicine to be an orderly field of knowledge and procedure,” he said. “The going words these days are ‘precision medicine’ or ‘personalized medicine’…and that conjures an image of this being a world of orderliness. But it’s not.”
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Epic waste of health care dollars is clearly visible from the altitude provided by the Dartmouth Atlas Project, which for more than two decades has tracked trends in health care spending—via Medicare data—nationally. But author Shannon Brownlee, whose award-winning reportage has relied heavily on DAP data, offered ground-level perspective on America’s overtreatment addiction at a Mar. 27 talk in Bldg. 50, presented by the NIH Consensus Development Program.
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