The Business Beat: Dr. Marc Harrison of the Cleveland Clinic

Why the Cleveland Clinic is a good role model for truly healthy health care?
“The Hospital That Could Cure Health Care: Cleveland Clinic is both highly effective and fiercely efficient. So why are its methods so rare?”

That’s the title of a November 27, 2009 feature article in Newsweek.

The article begins by noting:

“The Cleveland Clinic, where President Obama went in July to see high-quality, cost-efficient medicine in action, has miniaturized robotic tools that can repair a heart valve through an incision less than an inch long, a computer system that allows doctors to read patients' charts and write orders from anywhere in the world, and the last word in networked, interactive supply closets.”

“Any time a nurse takes something from a shelf, it's recorded by a program that keeps a running count of 350 items in hundreds of locations, and can dispatch a self-guided robot cart to bring replacements from the warehouse.”

“A century after Henry Ford began building cars on an assembly line, Cleveland Clinic has brought that technique to medicine, updated to reflect the latest Japanese-inspired thinking on ‘lean manufacturing’ and "continuous-cycle improvement."

“Cleveland Clinic is a hospital trying to be a Toyota factory.”

My guest, Dr. Marc Harrison, M.D., is chief of medical operations for the Cleveland Clinic Health System in Cleveland, Ohio.