Some of my favorite people are physicians, including my most favorite of all, my wife. She will be the first to attest that most physicians are idiot savants: so brilliant in some areas, so helpless in others. When it comes to business affairs, for example, most react the same way a CEO would when asked to articulate the Sphincter of Oddi. They learn medicine in medical school, which is really important, but that doesn’t leave much time for even a basic business education.

Not being a doctor myself, I have always regarded my wife’s profession as foreign and exotic. Of course, there’s the life-and-death part (I don’t see much of that in business consulting). Then there’s the element my wife and I have in common: thinking and acting quickly amid chaos.

Way back at the turn of the century, when my wife was still in medical school at Emory University in Atlanta, I started researching how doctors gather, assess, share, and act on information to make decisions. I learned that, despite being notoriously poor at business, doctors can teach business leaders a great deal.

Continuity of care is a major challenge in medicine, particularly at teaching hospitals. Medical students, interns, residents, fellows, and attending physicians rotate in and out, shift by shift, month by month.

The daily routine in a teaching hospital involves several levels of review of each patient (making the “rounds,” as they say). Starting in the very early morning at the bottom levels of the pyramid, medical students follow interns as they assess each patient. Later, interns report to residents, who in turn report to fellows and attending physicians.

At each level, there is a combination of trust and skepticism. Pushing aside an inexperienced intern would save time for the higher-ranking resident at that moment, but it would do so at the cost of the entire program. However, as important as it is to allow younger physicians to learn for themselves, responsibility and liability increase at each stage. A fellow, for example, must validate and scrutinize all information before passing it along as fact to her attending physician at the top of the pyramid.

In addition to the daily rounds, daytime teams often hand-off patients to nighttime teams and then resume responsibility the following morning. Hand-offs, in theory, compromise the continuity of care; however, we really don’t want our doctors working long hours and making decisions on too little sleep (the standard workweek for interns and residents was capped at 80 hours nationwide in 2003).

The combination of multi-level reporting (rounding) and labor personnel transitions (hand-offs) demands consistent, efficient, and reliable communication in order to mitigate the associated risks. This is also true in the business world. Project managers come and go, middle management cannot be in two places at once, executives need to know what’s going on without drowning in trivia.

When I discovered how doctors handle this challenge, I immediately realized how my own business could benefit. One convention practiced far and wide in the medical community is referred to as a S.O.A.P. note—an acronym for “subjective, objective, assessment, plan.” The S.O.A.P. note prioritizes and summarizes the situation for a specific patient, preparing the entire team to take appropriate action in the patient’s best interests.

Subjective
The subjective section of the report presents a brief narrative of the current conditions, supported by a review of the patient’s medical and social history. The purpose of this section is to lead with the patient’s chief complaint—that which, in the patient’s mind, demands the most attention. When I implemented S.O.A.P. notes, I was running a management consulting group that served Fortune 500 and government clients. Our project managers were “rounding” with their “patients” (our clients) daily and the subjective section of the S.O.A.P. notes helped the entire team focus on how well we were caring for the “patient” instead of just being concerned with our progress in delivering the project.

Objective
The objective section includes the patient’s vital signs. In most medical settings, these include temperature, pulse, blood pressure, and respiratory rate (some include pain as a vital sign, which can be particularly applicable to business situations). Substitute your own metrics—gross margin, days outstanding, utilization, revenue per customer, profit per employee—and you can see how the subjective and objective sections complement each other.

Assessment
The assessment section presents the diagnosis. I will never tire of listening to my wife’s thought process as she walks through the “differential diagnosis” for each case, a method for determining the cause of the problem by working backward from the observed symptoms. Time is of the essence and each patient’s body and mind work differently, so the goal is not to discover the silver bullet, but rather to figure out the best step to take next.

Plan
All of this investigation and deep thinking yields, ideally, a comprehensive plan of action. The plan for a pancreatitis patient, for example, would include follow-up lab tests in two weeks, a clear liquid diet for one week, no alcohol, and a prescription for pain medication. Physicians with a good bedside manner explain the plan to the patient in clear, certain terms so everyone involved knows what to expect.

I made it a point not to adjourn management meetings at my firm until we had established a comprehensive plan of action for each project. With this expectation firmly in place, each project manager was not only compelled to stand and deliver, but also to invest real thought into his or her recommendations.

Consulting engagements, just like patients, come in all shapes and sizes. Some are the epitome of health and need nothing more than a regular checkup; others benefit from a one-time procedure and heal quickly; still others find themselves in the intensive care unit, cause unknown.