These are folks that keep people out of hospitals, out of emergency rooms, out of nursing homes. And not only that, they help people achieve more fulfilling lives.

These are folks that keep people out of hospitals, out of emergency rooms, out of nursing homes. And not only that, they help people achieve more fulfilling lives.

You know, 97 percent of the time, if you come into a hospital, everything goes well. But three percent of the time, we have major complications.

In many ways, the effort to study philosophy was my rebellion away from medicine. I'm the son of two Indian immigrant physicians, so the natural path for me would have been to become a doctor. I ended up doing the master's degree at Oxford in politics, philosophy, and economics while already having a seat in medical school. I was keeping that as my escape hatch. But my hope was that I might become a philosopher or something else entirely.

Just using a checklist requires [doctors] to embrace different values from ones we've had, like humility, discipline, teamwork.

I chose surgery because I thought that perhaps this would make me more like the kind of person I wanted to be.

I think the extreme complexity of medicine has become more than an individual clinician can handle. But not more than teams of clinicians can handle.