Hub and Spoke Design

Major hub hospitals reside in the cities, while spoke hospitals service the surrounding areas. “This strategy concentrates the best equipment and expertise within the hub, with telecommunication links that allow hub specialists to serve spoke patients remotely. Since these specialists perform a high number of specific procedures, they quickly develop skills that improve quality,” they write.

The best results in medicine come when we allow practitioners (and their teams) to specialize in their craft. This is not what happens in the United States. Here, competing hospitals dilute the talent.

I’m an electrophysiologist, so let’s use two heart rhythm procedures, catheter ablation of atrial fibrillation and pacemaker/defibrillator lead extraction, as examples. These are good examples because it takes hundreds of cases and years of experience to master these “feel”-dependent procedures. Experienced operators who are concentrated in a few major centers should be the only doctors doing these procedures. In most American cities, though, these two procedures are divvied up among many hospitals and many operators. However, the literature is replete with studies that correlate outcomes with operator training and experience.

The notion that building big beautiful hospitals in the suburbs for convenience—and then thinking they are good places for care—is insulting. What’s wrong with saying: I’m sorry you are facing lead extraction, but for this, you need to go to Hospital X, and it’s downtown. Sorry. It’s inconvenient and the parking stinks. But it’s best for your health. At the moment, American health practitioners aren't courageous enough to say this.

Task Shifting

The authors also point out that in India, lower-level staffers perform a much wider array of medical tasks: “The transfer of responsibility for routine tasks to lower-skilled workers leaves doctors free to focus on complicated medical procedures. Several hospitals have created a tier of paramedic workers with two years of training after high school to perform routine medical jobs. As a result, surgeons, for example, are able to perform two to three times as many surgeries as their U.S. counterparts. Compare that with the United States, where hospitals reduce costs by laying off support staff and shifting mundane tasks such as billing and transcription to doctors, who are overqualified for those duties.”

Consider my experience: After performing nearly 10,000 catheter ablations and cardiac devices over 15 years, I've gotten really good at these procedures. In my city of one million people, Louisville, Kentucky, there are only a handful of other doctors who do these procedures well. In an Indian system, we would be protected. We would be asked to do high-level heart procedures and little else. Yet that’s not the case in the U.S. system. I can only do these skill-dependent procedures two and a half days a week. That’s because I have other duties, like managing routine blood tests, seeing routine follow-ups, and entering clerical data on each patient. In fact, due to the burden of tasks, I've had to reduce the number of patients I see by nearly 50 percent over the past decade.