If you read the complete article it specifically mentions that Sam's condition did trigger some checklists, but those checklists were willfully ignored in favor of expediency.
The problem isn't that there's not enough checklists, the problem is that there's one pilot and he's trying to fly 3 Boeings at the same time from the air traffic control tower.
> These unreliable warnings can lead to “alert fatigue” and, sometimes, a mental habit of discounting them.
This is a problem the airline industry also struggles with and even more checklists is not the answer. A lower workload and better crew resource management is.
I think it's more like Sam's condition did not clearly fit into a checklistable entity. Our heart rate and temperature go up when we have the flu, but we don't all go in to hospital for antibiotics or die at home. Probably they should have done more work-up the second time he came in but as the article points out that could also have been negative. He was probably just too young for checklists built for older people to pick up on his condition.
Also sounds like he was left alone which does not help either. I had similar to Sam, in early sepsis but none of markers were there until I went delirious. Wife picked up on it right away and that time, ER picked up on it.
I can't remember where I read or saw this, but it struck me as the obvious key difference: In aviation, procedures and practices are developed in concert with experts in aviation maintenance, aviation engineering, various parts of system design, and the people who fly the darn planes. In medicine, the lobbyists, politicians, and software companies have political and economic incentives and communication structures quite divorced from the practiced expertise of actual end users, not to mention the people being treated. So you have all these 'best practices' being imposed that have little to do with the sorts of best practices health practitioners would do or want to do or what patients need.
The problem isn't that there's not enough checklists, the problem is that there's one pilot and he's trying to fly 3 Boeings at the same time from the air traffic control tower.
> These unreliable warnings can lead to “alert fatigue” and, sometimes, a mental habit of discounting them.
This is a problem the airline industry also struggles with and even more checklists is not the answer. A lower workload and better crew resource management is.