Resemblance Standups and Hospital rounds

My background is that I went to med school and took a 180 and became a software developer.

This was always something I found super cool and thought I'd share with this crowd, and wanted to see if any of you share any insight too.

When I was a fourth year med student, I was the observer/intern level student following residents around in hospitals. My emotions aside (realized there was a reason I loved computers – too introvert), what I observed was this:

1. Residents would check up on patients before the round, to internalize the status of the patients.

2. Attending (like the head physician whose buck stops, think tech lead) joins in a pre-round meeting. This works exactly like a standup.

• Last night/on-call resident goes over all the events of last night for each patient.
• Then residents talk about the morning checkup, summary of each patients they are assigned.
• Attending would then listen and give some questions if patients are severe or residents missed checking up on something, etc

1. Round starts. Attending goes around with the team, checking up on each patient. Resident will talk about their respective patient when they go to the patient.

2. After that, attending leaves to do some operation / outpatient work, while residents / med students hustle the whole day doing doctor stuff

3. At the end of the day shift, before they go home (if at all), they write up their findings / progress. This is exactly like git commits!

When graduating from med school, and joining my first standup, I was in a shock (oh the flashbacks), of how similar it is with hospital rounds (pre-rounds to be specific).

And then I remembered about this when I read 'The Lean Startup' – how all of this started from Toyota's work in making their factories efficient. How hospitals also go through Kanban processes to make it work, and also how they model their OR routines based on Formula 1 pitstops.

It's quite amazing to me how these similarities happen.

As an aside I often wondered how git processes could help writing patient histories. Because doctors keep copy/pasting that over and over as patients progress in the hospital, with some minor changes in text (not insignificant, just stating text length). The medical records systems they use literally have templates that doctors can customize so they save time. Why can't they just commit/merge/diff so one up-to-date patient note exists, and they can graphically view the history of the notes, instead of rummaging through piles of text files?