Could this mathematician’s formula fix US hospitals?

An Arm and a Leg

Society & Culture, Medicine, Health, Health & Fitness, Documentary

4.8 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 22 May 2025

⏱️ 34 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

What do the KGB and the former CEO of Cincinnati Children's Hospital have in common?

At different times, they’ve each looked to a guy named Eugene Litvak for help. He only said yes to Cincinnati — but he saved that hospital more than a hundred million dollars a year.

For the last few decades, Litvak – a Soviet émigré with a PhD in math – has been on a mission: save U.S. hospitals from financial ruin, and improve the lives of doctors, nurses, and patients.

He says he has just the formula to do it, lots of prominent experts agree, and he’s documented impressive results so far: Financial savings, fewer hospital-related deaths, lower staff turnover, and shorter wait times.

But Litvak and his allies are still struggling to convince more hospital CEOs to try his method.

We talk with Litvak about his wild life story and how he found the fix that he says could revolutionize American hospitals. And we speak with experts to determine why more hospitals don’t try it.

Here’s a transcript of this episode.

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Transcript

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0:05.1	Garbage in New York, that was like a controlled substance. We show you how money influences everything.
0:11.6	Tell me what you like by telling me how you spend your money. And we dig until we get answers.
0:17.5	I had a bad feeling you're going to bring that up. Planet Money finds out. All you have to do is listen. The Planet Money podcast from NPR. Did you know that we are living
0:26.0	in a pinball renaissance right now? I'm Dyer Oxley and on the latest episode of Meet Me Here,
0:32.9	we will meet two local pinheads. Yes, that is the term, to talk about why you should join them
0:39.1	and have a flipping good time at the next local pinball tournament
0:43.3	and beat the Seattle Freeze one extra ball at a time.
0:48.1	Listen to meet me here on the KUOW app or wherever you get your podcast.
0:53.9	Hey there. Mark Taylor is a reporter.
0:57.0	And when he started covering health care in the 1990s, the beat was not his first choice.
1:02.7	I thought it was a punishment.
1:04.3	I thought, I don't know anything about health care.
1:06.6	I was bad at science.
1:08.0	I was bad at math.
1:09.6	I didn't understand any of this stuff. but I just was determined not to fail at it.
1:15.8	And I dove into it headfirst.
1:18.6	And my wife said, you know, you used to read novels in bed.
1:23.1	And now you're reading the CDC's mortality and morbidity report.
1:27.6	About 20 years in, he picked up some medical journals, like you do, and looked at some studies
1:33.0	about work by a guy named Eugene Lithfack. I started reading these and going, wow, that's a good
1:40.3	story. Litvok was a math PhD with a background in operations management, systems engineering.
	...

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