Donald Berwick, a Harvard Medical School professor and chief executive of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, says as much as 40% of U.S. medical spending is squandered on inefficientoperations and unnecessary overhead.
This is hugely inefficient, because pricey late interventions and operations could very often have been avoided with a much smaller investment in preventive care.
Oddly--or sadly--enough, overcrowding in hospitals is actually the result not of sudden infectious outbreaks, but of the inefficient way surgeons book their operating rooms, says Eugene Litvak, a Boston University operations management expert.