When people talk about "reinventing the wheel, " it is often meant to discourage, even disparage. As in, "why reinvent the wheel?" It usually refers to a technology or a process that works well enough and is widely enough distributed that trying to replace it would be a fool's errand. Fortunately, the folks at DARPA aren't afraid of fool's errands -- and they are literally reinventing the wheel. Healthcare could use some fool's errands of its own. We all know what a wheel is. We know a wheel when we see one, we know what one does, we know how they do it. We've all traveled on wheels -- skates, bikes, cars, buses, whatever. It's hard to imagine a world before the wheel, before that beautiful circular shape, and it's hard to imagine improving on it.

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