Dr. Daniel Cabrera's LOS for Emergency Medicine

2014 July 27

I was pleased and honored to see this adaptation by Dr. Daniel Cabrera at Mayo Clinic on applying the Laws of Simplicity to the emergency medicine space. The link is here: http://mayocl.in/1rI8GuA Thank you Dr. Cabrera! -JM

  • Reduce. The easiest way to approach a clinical problem is to reduce it to its minimal meaningful expression.
  • Organize. Grouping problems and information make infinite problems appears finite.
  • Time. Decrease time spent in meaningless activities and increasing time on essential tasks.
  • Learn. Knowledge is key, you need to know where to find the answer to any question.
  • Differences. The key is to find what makes a clinical problem different from others and not how to make it fit into a pattern.
  • Context. The environment provides meaning to the problem; not the other way around.
  • Emotion. Use your intuition (quasirrational decision making) and avoid your emotional and cognitive biases.
  • Trust. Less information is better than more information. Subtract the meaningless and add the meaningful.
  • Failure. Use metacognition to learn where the system failed. Learn from your and others mistakes.
  • The-One. Clinical problems are more complex than they look but simpler than you think.