title: The ballet of baseball: lessons of the game for hospice.
abstract: As Yogi Berra once said, "The future ain't what it used to be." In the era of rapid change in health care, hospice and palliative care programs will survive only through organizational teamwork. Using the lessons of baseball, we present a stadium-eye perspective on how programs can take the three fundamentals of baseball--pitching, batting, and fielding--and translate them into the three fundamentals of organizational teamwork--clinical, operational, and financial. The best clinicians (pitchers) are of no use if the office operations (batting) keep the patients (fans) out of the stadium and no program can survive without the financial resources (fielding.) When you come to a fork in the road, take it.
authors.affiliation: Minnesota Partnership to Improve End of Life Care, St Paul, USA.
authors.forename: L
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Norlander
authors.forename: T
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Grimmer
mesh_terms: D017051:Hospice Care / Q000191:economics / Q000379:methods*; D006801:Humans; D010166:Palliative Care / Q000191:economics / Q000379:methods*; D010348:Patient Care Team; D014481:United States