Broken workflows—and how to fix them

Very premature babies need lots of immediate medical attention. Which is why one neo-natal team in an American hospital texted the acronym “ELBW”, shorthand for “extremely low birth weight”, to relevant clinical staff if they wanted them to get to the unit fast. Unfortunately, some recipients of this message took it to mean that a baby had a problem with its elbow, and did not require an urgent response. This excruciating story is one of many told in a new book, “There’s Got To Be A Better Way”, by Nelson Repenning, a business-school professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Donald Kieffer, a one-time operations executive at Harley-Davidson who also lectures at MIT.