What health systems can learn from the Southwest meltdown

What health systems can learn from the Southwest meltdown

When winter storm Elliott wreaked havoc on holiday travel, Southwest Airlines was forced to cancel over half its flights between December 21st and 29th. Their point-to-point operating model was less agile than the hub-and-spoke models other major airlines employ, and as a result, their rough operational recovery led to monumental customer and employee dissatisfaction.

Unlike Southwest’s point-to-point model, a hub-and-spoke model concentrates employees and equipment in hub locations and this built-in redundancy can accelerate system-wide recovery. Southwest’s point-to-point operations and dated technology platform contributed to its inability to reconfigure flight schedules and crews, only compounding its logistical challenges.

The same is true in the realm of healthcare transportation (hub-and-spoke model) and medical couriers (predominantly in the point-to-point model). Supported by big data, predictive analytics and enhanced communications, the complex systems of healthcare transportation (as compared to medical couriers) create efficiencies that offer benefits to healthcare providers.

In this article that I wrote with David Johnson of 4sight Health we look at a survey done by American Nurse on how medical courier errors are a source of significant operational disruption and distress for nurses. These kinds of delivery failures exemplify the detrimental impact that accruing minor failures can have on operational efficiency and employee morale.

As illustrated by Southwest, in a point-to-point model, small failures can intensify within complex systems, and minor glitches can become tipping points that trigger operational breakdowns. At a time when healthcare is wrestling with major logistical and financial challenges related to clinical staffing, providers need to do all they can to ease the burden that the current system imposes on nurses and other frontline caregivers by ensuring their healthcare transportation/courier supports their ability to deliver good healthcare.