One of the main issues here is that medical care is largely non-procedural and intuition-based. That's why doctors have to spend years doing training, followed by years of experience. Their "checklists" are created one step at a time, per-patient.

This is exactly what needs to be changed in order to disrupt healthcare. Once medical care becomes procedural (ie generated by smart software, per patient, based on the patient's electronic health record which includes genomic and molecular data), we can begin replacing highly specialized doctors with non-specialized ones (and eventually with nurses). Of course, there are probably tons of areas where "simpler" checklists can be made to have a significant impact on outcomes (for example making sure the right patient gets the right drugs, etc..).

Clay Christensen's book, Innovator's Prescription, goes into a lot of detail about how this will most likely play out: http://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Prescription-Disruptive-Sol...