Checklists are incredibly useful and a couple of recent books make a strong case for checklists in healthcare. In Safe Patients, Smart Hospitals: How One Doctor’s Checklist Can Help Us Change Health Care from the Inside Out, authors Peter Pronovost and Eric Vohr discuss how a simple checklist helped reduce infection rates at Johns Hopkins to virtually zero for a specific procedure. And in The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right, Atul Gawande shows how checklists are helping in all kinds of situations.
Checklists don’t have to be complicated. In fact, simpler is often better, because compliance is improved. One of the items on Provonost’s checklist was extremely simple: “Wash your hands.” You’d think this would be so obvious that putting this on a checklist wouldn’t really help, but people are human, and humans forget.
All of this got me thinking – what items would be worth adding to a life science marketing checklist? These items would be of fundamental importance – like washing your hands. I’ll be posting some of my own suggestions soon, and I invite you to share your own in the comment box below. What would be an item on your life science marketing checklist?