NEW ORLEANS  -  And here you thought the only things airplanes and hospitals had in common were checklists.

You may remember Atul Gawande's 2009 book, The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right (Picador), in which the surgeon and New Yorker staffer shows how meticulous pre-planning  -  by pilots, but also by physicians  -  can lead to safer outcomes and save lives.

In on of the HIT X.0 presentations this past month at the 2013 HIMSS Annual Conference & Exhibition, Robert Szczerba, corporate director of global healthcare initiatives at Lockheed Martin showed how healthcare has a lot more to learn from the aerospace industry.

His presentation spotlighted how the aviation pioneer's work in modeling and simulation, systems interoperability and data analytics is being brought to bear on a healthcare system that's in bad need of a better safety record.

Szczerba started by rattling off the familiar charges against the United States system: $750 billion in unnecessary care. Some 200,000 preventable deaths per year. More than 1.5 medical errors per person, per day in the ICU. One-third (33 percent) of patients suffer harm during their stay in the hospital.

"Would you buy an iPhone if every third time you used it you got a shock?" he asked.

Even worse: if plane crashes were causing a couple hundred-thousand deaths a year, would you get on an aircraft?

Ameliorating healthcare's woes will require more than cosmetic fixes, said Szczerba. "If you're not changing the underlying culture, can you really impact change?"

And checklists alone aren't enough, either. Szczerba explained why the lists have found such enthusiastic acceptance in the airline industry, but are still underused in healthcare. It has to do with incentives: The pilot is getting on the aircraft, after all; the physician is not quite as self-interested in the outcome. 

At any rate, we're all affected. "There's no alternatives to healthcare," said Szczerba. "In aviation you might be able to take a train.

Lockheed Martin has been working on new ways of approaching the healthcare crisis through its work on the ICE STORM initiative. It stands for Integrated Clinical Environment; Systems, Training, Operations, Research, Methods. (Although, as Szczerba puts its, if he were naming a project meant to transform the entire U.S. healthcare industry for the better, "I would not name it after a natural disaster.")

The project takes "a holistic approach" that combines analytics, system engineering, showing how the technologies that revolutionized aerospace can also transform healthcare.

Just as it's nonsensical that healthcare doesn't make use of checklists as readily as the air industry, the same holds true for other approaches.

No pilot flies a plan without first practicing  -  for many hours  -  on a simulator, for instance.

"Why can't you have simulation-based training in healthcare?" asks Szczerba. The technology exists these days to "create virtual worlds that are so realistic they are indistinguishable form the actual thing."

Why not create "low-risk, low-cost simulated environments," modeled precisely on the hospital or doctors' office, where caregivers can, via simulate avatars, learn optimal workflows and experience different clinical scenarios? Virtually interfacing with actual equipment can help teach optimal usage of health IT.

On the way to this situational awareness, "interoperability"  -  as much as that word was ballyhooed at HIMSS13  -  "is just the first step," said Szczerba.

As an engineer, "I can get my toaster to talk to my TV," he said. "Does anyone care?"

True "systems integration is where we need to go," said Szczerba. And on that front, the aerospace industry is leagues ahead of healthcare.

Eventually, he said, the goal should be a "continuous process improvement cycle," with analytics leading to strategic simulation, which sheds light on better systems integration, which makes for more efficient care, the data from which then becomes fodder for analytics. And so on. 

There's no shortage of processes and outcomes that can be improved. For one example, from the ICE STORM website, "What if the alarms from multiple medical devices made by different manufacturers could be intelligently processed so that critical notifications are never missed?"

From evidence-based design to efficient operations, from clinical decision support to crowdsourced best practices, healthcare has a lot to learn from other industries  -  if it's willing.

"The technology is out there," said Szczerba. "The capabilities are out there. It's in your hands."