Until 1992, the word “goat” was used in sports to describe someone who made a crucial mistake to cost their team a game, with Bill Buckner’s misplay of Mookie Wilson’s “little roller up along first” in Game 6 of the 1986 World Series forever etched in the minds of..
Hal Andrews
Recent Posts
Winning a Losing Game, Part III: Why Health Systems Don’t Know Their Actual Market Share
The hospital business is a negative-sum game.
Winning a Losing Game, Part II: Lessons from Nick Saban on Thinking Like a Champion
Alabama won another college football national championship last week, the seventh for Coach Nick Saban in the past 16 years. With the win, Coach Saban surpassed another Alabama coach, Bear Bryant, who previously held the record for most national championships by a..
Winning a Losing Game, Healthcare Edition
Poker players know that if you sit down at the table and cannot figure out who the "mark" is, then it is you.
Farr’s Law: A Retrospective Analysis
Over the holidays, an executive with one of the nation’s largest health systems asked me about our Farr’s Law posts, wondering whether things had turned out as we anticipated. His question was based in part on the media’s incessant coverage of the number of..
The Law of Holes, PCR Cycle Thresholds, and the Hotel California
Hindsight is 20/15, and in hindsight America’s response to the pandemic could have been better. What matters now is what we can change for the better now. The First Law of Holes, aka The Law of Holes, is this: “If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.” The..
Beware Stanford’s Frankenstein this Halloween
Why the most important KPI for every hospital CEO is KYC: Know Your Congressman
The One Thing That HCA and Walmart NEVER Do…
2020 has been full of unpleasant surprises, especially for hospitals and healthcare providers. One thing, however, is unfortunately not a surprise: the number of health systems reporting that they have “cut back” or “eliminated” (gasp) their strategy budgets.
Farr's Law: It's Happening...
In 1840, the British epidemiologist William Farr submitted a letter to the Registrar-General regarding his observations on the causes of death in England and Wales in the year 1838. In his 28-page abstract, Mr. Farr had occasion to observe certain characteristics of..