A Prescription for the Future
How Hospitals Could Be Rebuilt, Better Than Before
The Economist, April 8, 2017
In a nondescript part of Cleveland, in a room known as the bunker, a doctor, nurses and medical technicians gather to keep watch over 150 patients in special-care units and intensive-care beds. Their patients are scattered around the region, in clinics that have no specialists covering the night shift. On a wall of beeping screens the bunker team members track their charges’ vital signs. They can zoom in on any patient via a camera at the foot of each bed. “These here are PVCs [premature ventricular contractions]; they’re bad things,” says Jim Goldstein, a cardiac technician, pointing to a graph of a patient’s heartbeat. The PVCs are getting worse, warns a flashing light. It’s time to alert a nurse on the ground.