Escape Fire
Designs for the Future of Health Care
Preface
To read these eleven speeches in one sitting, as I have now done,
makes me dizzy. They pass before me at a speed disrespectful of the
difficult decade they mark.
When I gave the first speech in this collection, "Kevin Speaks,"
in 1992 in front of sixteen hundred self-starting mavericks, the
Institute for Healthcare Improvement was a young organization
with a handful of employees, and health care had no quality movement
at all. Ben, my oldest child, was a high school junior, and Becca,
my youngest, was in first grade. (Ben is now a legislative aide on
Capitol Hill and Becca is a high school senior.) Hillary Clinton was
just about to try to rescue American health care. Avedis Donabedian
and W. Edwards Deming were alive and well. So was my father. My
family had not yet lived for a year in Alaska, or even imagined doing
so. We were all healthy. I ran twenty miles a week, and my wife's two
years of devastating illness were far in the future. The European
Forum on Quality Improvement in Health Care and the Asia Pacific
Forum did not exi ... read full excerpt from Escape Fire: Designs for the Future of Health Care ebook
