Or, actually, the article I found is called How Hospital Design Saves Lives:

The report emphasized the benefit to be had from focusing not on individual people making individual mistakes, but rather on the systems themselves. Health care, the Institute of Medicine said, had to learn from industries such as aviation, nuclear power, and construction that dramatically increased safety using “systems thinking,” looking holistically at failures, rather than identifying a single weak link.

For health care, that meant replacing individual blame with collective responsibility. Improvements are already visible. In June, Dr. Donald Berwick of the Harvard School of Public Health announced that an estimated 122,300 lives had been saved in just the last 18 months, as a result of changes—ranging from improved hand-washing to establishing an organization-wide mandate for safety—recommended by the “100,000 Lives Campaign” sponsored by the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, a Cambridge (Mass.)-based nonprofit.

A few benefits from better systems:

• Consistent work places, such as surgery rooms where the “right” is always on the right, reduce predictable errors. Perhaps surgeons could also use terms like starboard and port for the human body? Although I’d be nervous if I heard a surgeon start a procedure with “anchors a-weigh!”
• Clean air reduces infection rate. Seems pretty obvious for a hospital, but apparently this wasn’t given appropriate priority in past systems.
• Natural light improves mental health. I always wonder about hospitals that keep all their fluorescent lights on but the shades are drawn during the daytime. Perhaps heat-shielding or even solar-absorbing windows would cut down the negative effects of natural light while letting the positive remain
• Reduces cost of maintenance
• Increases likelihood of “green” practices, which further reduces harmful exposure and impact to the environment

Interesting to see tangible health and energy benefits from removing bugs in health-care systems. Of course there is some question of what it really means to be “evidence-based” since one person’s evidence might be seen by others as faith — a system of resolution is necessary.

Whoa, that’s a lot of tokens. Is the price justified? I must have been asleep when this happened, or at least no one has made much noise about it. The past few token systems I’ve planned or managed on haven’t touched RSA, so maybe I was just out of the loop. Anyhow, apologies for the delay, but here it is:

…the world’s biggest maker of data storage equipment and software, on Thursday unveiled its latest acquisition when it agreed to pay $2.1bn in cash for RSA Security …

In a statement on Thursday, Joe Tucci, EMC chief executive, said: “Information security is a top priority among executives around the world, and it has become an inseparable attribute of information management.”

Correct, the attribute of security is inseparable from information, but that is a bit like saying the attribute of safety is inseparable from automobiles. I could make an analogy to financial risk instead of cars, but that might get confused with another top priority among executives around the world:

RSA earlier this month revealed that it was one of several dozen companies that had received a subpoena from the US attorney’s office related to stock options grants.

The acquisition seems to be aimed at the “secure storage” sector that Symantec-Veritas was supposed to be leading. Yet, these giants are so sloth-like and pricey when it comes to delivering solutions that I believe we really need a visonary or a start-up like StrongAuth to move things along. In fact, I suspect secure storage hosted solutions via big content providers will be more likely to catch on than direct-to-consumer products, so a big challenge for EMC will be getting buy-in from highly technical decision-makers who (should) push for thin margins and easy interop. Then again, if the buy-outs continue and competition stagnates at the enterprise level, Apple’s new archive product could prove to motivate the consumer secure storage market first.