Malcolm Gladwell Tells 3 Tales Of Interoperability

Malcolm Gladwell opened with a joke.

Confessing that he is expert in neither healthcare nor interoperability, the long-time journalist revealed that he had actually pondered how his former self would cover his present self as a speaker — likely with “quotes out of context and something really snarky.”

The best-selling author and New Yorker staffer, who was once a reporter for the Washington Post, likened the change required for healthcare to make it over the interoperability hurdle to several events of this generation, “three lessons in culture, framing and consequence,” as he put it during Thursday’s Healthcare Innovation Day.

The first is “the Bekaa Valley turkey shoot,” an incident in the Lebanon War of I982. A turkey shoot, because that’s what the Israelis did. They shot down all the Syrian aircraft within two days while only losing one helicopter themselves, and not to enemy fire.