[Sigia-l] Less info -> better results

[Listera]

Malcolm ("The Tipping Point") Gladwell's new book, "Blink" ("a book about
rapid cognition, about the kind of thinking that happens in a blink of an
eye") has an interesting example:

One of the stories I tell in "Blink" is about the Emergency Room doctors at
Cook County Hospital in Chicago. That's the big public hospital in Chicago,
and a few years ago they changed the way they diagnosed heart attacks. They
instructed their doctors to gather less information on their patients: they
encouraged them to zero in on just a few critical pieces of information
about patients suffering from chest pain--like blood pressure and the
ECG--while ignoring everything else, like the patient's age and weight and
medical history. And what happened? Cook County is now one of the best
places in the United States at diagnosing chest pain.

Not surprisingly, it was really hard to convince the physicians at Cook
County to go along with the plan, because, like all of us, they were
committed to the idea that more information is always better.

<http://gladwell.com/blink/index.html>

Ziya
Nullius in Verba