What healthcare can learn from the Cheesecake Factory

If you have visited the USA chances are you have visited the Cheesecake Factory. I have and I have to say it was a great experience. However I never thought it would be used as an example for healthcare. The food was tasty and voluminous., and for those of you who knows me, that is a compliment. So when a recent edition of The New Yorker published an article by one of my favourite healthcare writers Atul Gawande titled “Big Med” looking at what healthcare can learn from the various chain restaurants in the USA, and I was very interested to read it.
Dr Gawande uses the experience of a Cheesecake Factory employee with the health care system to ask the question, why can’t we learn from world’s best practice in healthcare?
Why can the Cheesecake Factory provide consistently high quality outcomes in the way of food cost effectively whilst hospitals struggle to provide consistent quality services?
The answer lies in balancing standardisation and flexibility, and providing people with the right tools to enable them to access standardised protocols whilst making sure they have the requisite knowledge to make optimal decisions.