In addition to the sterile cockpit concept Pape adapted, health care professionals have also borrowed from pilots the onboard “checklist”—a standardized rundown of tasks to be completed. In this case, too, imitation has worked wonders. In 2009, researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health and the World Health Organization reported that after the surgical teams in their study started using a nineteen-item checklist, the average patient death rate fell more than 40 percent, and the rate of complications decreased by about a third.
