INTERFACE / HANDOFF

At every transfer, make the state, owner, output, acceptance rules, and exceptions explicit.

Your father is seeing a new cardiologist Thursday. He will walk in with a plastic bag of pill bottles and a shrug. Fifteen minutes of appointment time will go to reconstructing history the last three doctors already knew, the new specialist will make a judgment with half the picture, and something important, like the reaction he had to a beta blocker in 2019, may never come up.

This move makes every transfer explicit: at the moment work or care passes between actors, you state the current state, the owner, the requested output, the acceptance rules, and the exceptions. The cue is a transfer where the receiver repeatedly lacks context or returns the wrong thing. The operation for Thursday: write one page covering current status, relevant history, prior test results, active medications, the specific questions you want answered, and the decision being requested. Hand it over and confirm it was understood. What changes is where the appointment starts: at the actual question instead of at archaeology. The spec's cautions: do not pass along a polished summary that hides raw observations and uncertainty, since the omissions can be the critical part, and do not add handoffs where none is needed; an approval step on work one qualified person can finish creates a queue, not control.