We've posted a few times about safety checklists for hospitals and Dr. Peter Pronovost, and about how the World Health Organization is promoting surgical checklists (we heard about that from Dr. Atul Gawande and the Institute for Healthcare Improvement.) Now there's evidence  published in the New England Journal of Medicine that the surgical checklists are making a difference. And that finding suggests that checklists could work in other settings as well.

  As my friend and colleague Maryn McKenna notes in her Superbug blog,

"Using a simple but detailed checklist, eight hospitals in a mix of high-income and resource-poor areas were able to reduce their rates of surgical complications by one-third and their rate of death due to surgical complications by almost one-half.

We don't always have good news on the health care quality/innovation front, so this is encouraging. Read the rest of Maryn's post here.