Latest Blog Posts

Annie
Regulating Healthcare
By Gerrit Van Wyk. Anything you can do I can do better. In the 1946 Broadway musical Annie Get Your Gun, there is a song going: anything you can do I can do better than you can do. That seems to be the...
Covid
How To Turn A Pandemic Into A Social Mess
By Gerrit Van Wyk. We shall fight on the beaches. The British Medical Journal this week published a series of articles as part of a postmortem on Canada’s response to the covid-19 pandemic, which...
Boer
The Planning Fetish
By Gerrit Van Wyk. ” ‘n Boer maak ‘n plan”. For many generations, most of my ancestors were farmers, with many farming in remote areas far from cities and supplies. From this experience, a...
Evidence
The Evidence for Evidence Based Medicine
By Gerrit Van Wyk Parachutes are optional for jumping from a plane. A double-blind study was published, in which subjects were randomized to receive a parachute or not and then jump from a plane. The authors...
frankenstein
Frankenstein Healthcare
By Gerrit Van Wyk. Reports, reports, and more reports. Mary Shelley published Frankenstein: or, the modern Prometheus in 1818, which is a horror story about a scientist who created an artificial man by...
Conspiracy
Why Conspiracy Theories?
By Gerrit Van Wyk. Have you heard? Much ink was spilled on and about conspiracy theories during the COVID pandemic by people who spent little time trying to understand it. As humans, we need stability,...
Toyota
What Happened To Lean Healthcare?
By Gerrit Van Wyk. Toyota patient care. Quite a few years ago, we had a problem with operating room (OR) time for surgery at the hospital I worked. The hospital, supposedly, was the first of its kind built...
AI
Artificial Intelligence For Healthcare - Be Careful What You Wish For
By Gerrit Van Wyk. Technology never makes mistakes. A few years ago, I questioned an ultrasound report during a conversation about a shared case with a specialist colleague, who responded, “an ultrasound...
Camel
Healthcare Needs Information Systems, Not Information Technology
By Gerrit Van Wyk. A camel is a horse designed by a committee. No industry produces as much data as the health care industry, and no industry converts it as poorly into information and knowledge. One may...
brain
Complex responsive processes of relating
By Gerrit Van Wyk. You cannot Tap Into a Brain. Ralph Stacey argued, in many ways human social behavior is like the complex adaptive systems (CAS) studied with computer simulations. For these simulations,...