The ballet of baseball: Lessons of the game for hospice

Abstract

As Yogi Berra once said, “The future ain’t what it used to be.” In the era of rapid change in health care, hospice and palliative care programs will survive only through organizational teamwork. Using the lessons of baseball, we present a stadium-eye perspective on how programs can take the three fundamentals of base-ball—pitching, batting, and fielding—and translate them into the three fundamentals of organizational team-work—clinical, operational, and financial. The best clinicians (pitchers) are of no use if the office operations (batting) keep the patients (fans) out of the stadium and no program can survive without the financial resources (fielding.)