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Since writing The Pittsburgh Way to Efficient Healthcare, I’ve made many fascinating connections and reconnections with people who have a passion for safety and quality, and who see the need for it in health care.

Shortly after the book’s publication, about this time last year, an industrial engineering professor from San Jose State recommended my book to an airline pilot who is a safety expert with his own consulting firm in the Bay Area of California. The pilot did a double-take. He realized that he not only knew and remembered me from when I worked at the ALPA office in Burlingame, California in the ‘80s, but that he had flown with my husband, Larry, also a commercial airline pilot. The two of them started with PSA, the California airline. We moved to Pittsburgh; he stayed in California, and both of them continued to work for the airline that became USAir.

After reading my book, this pilot called to reminisce with Larry, but mainly to discuss safety culture with me and see if there wasn’t some way we could team up. He is a brilliant expert in safety and human factors, widely respected in academia, and intensely interested in applying aviation safety in health care. I made some introductions for him, and we have kept up our e-mail correspondence over the past year. It was frustrating that there wasn’t exactly enthusiastic uptake with health care organizations, since his knowledge is so thorough and vast about every aspect of systems and safety.

From the medical side you’ll often hear, “Oh, aviation, yeah. We thought there was some stuff we could learn, but bodies aren’t airplanes and medicine is far more complex than flight.” The idea that standardized work can make everyone safer (and save billions of dollars) has yet to be fully embraced.

And yet consider the latest international study on operating room checklists, showing a 36% decrease in errors and a 47% decrease in mortality, and a cost savings of $15 billion a year in this country alone if a 19-step checklist were followed. (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28662096) Aviation safety holds valuable lessons for American medicine, a fact that is becoming more obvious every day.

Yesterday it was my turn to do a double-take when CNN flashed the photo of our pilot friend, Sully Sullenberger, as the captain who landed that aircraft, “dead stick,” on the Hudson River. My husband was not surprised that, if anyone could pull off ditching an A-320, it would be Sully. He is as he has been described, a pilot’s pilot.

So ironically, yesterday’s Miracle on the Hudson may generate some great news for healthcare safety and quality. Now that Sully is a national hero, he may well be in a position to promote the safety culture in medicine and exploit the common ground between aviation and medicine. At last!

It’s fantastic when all the passengers make it out of serious incidents like this one. Personally, we always cheer if the pilots get out. For this episode to end this way, and for safety to come out a winner, is good news indeed. For an influential character to emerge on the national scene, one who knows that safety and reliability are key–that could be great news for health care.