Online Guide: Miracle Workers

LESSONS FROM THE HEALTH CARE INDUSTRY

These days, every organization is trying to do more with less, but nowhere are the customers more important -- and the stakes of good work higher -- than in the health care industry. Here, we've gathered some of our most provocative stories. We take you through an inner-city pediatrics emergency room, a crowded delivery ward and a renowned cancer center. Meet some of the hardest working teams around and take your own prescription for healthy innovation.

Miracle of Birth

Looking for inspired leadership, passionate employees, unsurpassed productivity, and grateful customers? Forget the dispirited corridors of corporate America. Look instead to the bursting-with-life corridors of Parkland Memorial Hospital, a remarkable place that delivers more than 16,000 babies per year -- more babies than any other hospital in the country. Charles Fishman

Strategic Innovation: The Children`s Hospital at Montefiore

Dr. Irwin Redlener has spent his career devising solutions to large-scale problems of health care for disenfranchised children. The latest expression of his single-minded agenda combines excellence in pediatric care with cutting-edge design, the latest technology, and the worldview of Carl Sagan. Polly LaBarre

(Not) the Same Old Story

Eden Alternative is a change-minded organization determined to save a critically ill patient: long-term care for the elderly. The nursing-home industry should be about living, argues founder Bill Thomas, not about dying. Here`s his prescription -- and lessons for changing any industry. Chuck Salter

The Agenda - Total Teamwork

Teams of doctors, nurses, and technicians at the world-renowned Mayo Clinic bring new-economy practices to "old-fashioned" medicine. Paul Roberts