For the first few months, the staff would use their own judgment in evaluating chest pain, the way they always had.

announced that he was holding a bake-off. 'Reilly's first act was to turn to the work of a cardiologist named Lee Goldman. And those thirty used more than their share of beds and nurses and doctors and stayed around a lot longer than other patients.' 'From the beginning, the question of how to deal with heart attacks was front and center.' About 30 people a day came into the ER 'were worried that they were having a heart attack. One of the most resource-sapping processes was the treatment of patients who entered the ER complaining of chest pains. The Emergency Room faced extreme amounts of resource pressure in particular there were too many patients needing care and too few doctors and beds to serve them all promptly. Brendan Reilly, named the chairman of Medicine at Cook's County Hospital in Chicago in 1996, was in dire need of a way to improve the conditions of the hospital when he showed up there. The example he shares about an overcrowded hospital Emergency Room's decision making process really resonated with me. I'm currently readying his book 'Blink,' about how people make process information and make decisions in the 'blink of an eye.'

Malcolm Gladwell's three best-selling books are filled with fascinating examples of all sorts of things to underscore the interesting points he makes about a wide variety of topics.

One Doctor by Brendan Reilly