Lean Healthcare

Improving Healthcare Delivery by Studying Toyota

The Seattle Post Intelligencer had a good article a few days ago giving an update on the lean journey at Virginia Mason Medical Center in Seattle, titled To build a better hospital, Virginia Mason takes lessons from Toyota plants When you think of a hospital, what comes to mind? Patients, more>>

101 Kaizen Templates: The Checklist

This is the first post in the 101 kaizen templates series. Only 100 more kaizen templates to go before December 31, 2008! Takt time is 3.5 days per template. I considered planning out and structuring this series but for now we'll just go with the flow and pull. How can more>>

Free Videos on Lean Healthcare, Toyota Production System

Here are a pair of free videos on YouTube. The first is titled A Quick Introduction to Lean Thinking and it is brought to you by the NHS group Institute for Innovation and Improvement. Some of the graphics and examples of Lean in healthcare are useful. The second is a more>>

Is IT the Key to Improving Healthcare Quality and Efficiency?

Is IT the key to improving healthcare quality and efficiency? The majority of healthcare opinion leaders seem to think so. The findings from the Commonwealth Fund/Modern Healthcare Opinion Leaders Survey appeared in the July 30 edition of Modern Healthcare, in an article titled IT Seen as No. 1 Key to more>>

Is Michael Moore a Lean Thinker?

Monday on the Lean Blog Mark Graban did some interesting reflection and analysis on claims by filmmaker Michael Moore that 18,000 people die each year in the U.S. due to the lack of health insurance. The U.S. population, per Google, is approximately 301,000,000. That gives us 254,000,000 WITH insurance. If more>>

Medicare May Stop Paying for Hospital Errors

Medicare may stop paying for hospital errors in 2008, according to a May 22, 2007 article from IndyStar.com titled Hospital-borne ailments face Medicare budget ax. According to the article: Medical mistakes are deadly and expensive. Infections acquired in hospitals account for about 90,000 deaths and $4.5 billion in extra spending more>>

Seven Ideas Towards a Healing Workplace

The entry last week on Standards, Abnormality and the Ideal seems to have struck a chord with folks. I've been thinking further about the idea of negative accidents or negative safety incidents and it is quite sound in theory and practice. Beyond a zero accident workplace, a healing workplace is more>>

A Fairly Lean Healthcare Experience

I hope everyone who celebrates Easter had a good Easter Sunday, and those of you who don't also had a good weekend. Thanks to a culture change in my throat brought on by some visiting Streptococcus, I didn't have a good weekend. A few amoxicillin pills later, I can reflect more>>

Toyota Production System as a Learning System

There is a new working paper by Michael Balle, author of The Gold Mine, that addresses how the Toyota Production System is in fact a learning system, using a hospital in France as a case study. The first page of the article contains a notice that it is a working more>>

Healthcare Costs Can Be Cut

Healthcare cost can be cut. So says a Pittsburgh Tribune-Review article by the same title on September 14, 2006. The examples from Virginia Mason Medical Center do demonstrate that healthcare costs can be cut, but is this enough? The article cites statistics from Robert Mecklinburg of Virginia Mason Medical Center, more>>

Lean Healthcare Plumbs New Depths at ?? Hospital

The news from Jean's workplace, where consultants have been giving Lean healthcare a bad name, has gotten worse. Jean writes: I think we, as a staff are beginning to feel like chicken pluckers in the Golden Plump Place where Faster is always better. The morale in our place of work more>>

Every Day is a Good Day for Daily Kaizen in Lean Healthcare

Today is a good day for Daily Kaizen! The intranet blog for the Lean healthcare team at Group Health Cooperative is now open to the public. The authors are Lee Fried, internal consultant who is spearheading the Lean effortsat Group Health Coopeartive in Seattle, and Ted Eytan, a physician who more>>

NHS Confederation Releases "Lean Thinking for the NHS"

The United Kingdom has taken an important step in leading the Lean healthcare movement today with the publication of Lean Thinking for the NHS by the NHS Confederation (National Health Service) based on studies done by the Lean Enterprise Academy. You can read the press release here, along with some more>>

Giving Lean Healthcare a Bad Name

We're giving Lean healthcare a bad name in Jean's world. Jean is a nurse at a hospital where Lean healthcare practices based on the Toyota Production System are being implemented. At Jean’s hospital, it sounds like they are making a mess of it. She found this blog through the article more>>

Good News! Hospitals are Healing Themselves through Kaizen

“All the things wrong with hospitals can be fixed.” Narrator Lloyd Dobyns tells us at the beginning of the video program Good News...How Hospitals Heal Themselves In the video program hospital administrators and clinicians tell us that there is 40% - 50% waste in a hospital system. This can include more>>

Pandemic Preparation: Just in Time or Just in Case?

In a January 12, 2006 Wall Street Journal article (which you can also find on the Pittsburgh Post Gazette) titled Just-in-Time Inventories Make U.S. Vulnerable in a Pandemic raises a question that is very common to organizations first starting out implementing Lean manufacturing. That question goes something like "Just in more>>

Crossing the Chasm of Lean Transformation, Part 2

Should the "wrong" approached be replaced by a path more closely following the one Toyota has taken? The "Training Within Industry" modeled approach to developing people and Toyota's hyper cost-focused management style may not bring results quickly enough to satisfy Wall Street or win out in a competitive market. I more>>

Crossing the Chasm of Lean Transformation, Part 1

A friend of mine who is a VP of Operations at a Midwestern hospital asked me two questions a few days ago. The first was "What is the percentage of Lean implementations that fail?" This is a loaded question, and not one for which I have a ready answer. If more>>

What's so Bad about Assembly Line Healthcare?

The October 8, 2005 news article from Singapore titled Thinking Out-of-the-Box Helps Alexandra Hospital Reduce Patient Waiting Time starts out "It worked for Toyota cars, so why not for patients at hospitals?" Why not indeed? According to the article the impact of Lean healthcare on patient flow included productivity improvement more>>

Lean Healthcare: Increase Value or Reduce Waste?

Today I had the opportunity to address the general session of the 43rd annual conference of the Association for Healthcare Resource & Materials Management. There were about 1,500 people in the audience, perhaps 1,000 Materials Managers and the balance exhibitors and conference organizers. The content of the talk was an more>>

The State of Lean Healthcare: Critical Mass is Building

The development of the awareness and practice of Lean in the healthcare sector has been interesting to watch over the last several years. Although a great number of people who work in healthcare are still in the "unaware" category there are increasing signs that it is developing rapidly. The main more>>

The Four Elements for Sustaining Kaizen

One of the most frequent questions we encounter form our customers and prospects is the issue of how to sustain the gains made through kaizen and other continuous improvement efforts. In a recent discussion among our consultants, we came to the agreement that the three traditional answers were inadequate and more>>

Where Does Lean Apply in Hospitals?

Where Does Lean Apply in Hospitals? Friday afternoon is a great time to call up the customers and find out what's on their minds. At Gemba we continue to benchmark with hospitals that are doing kaizen and pioneering Lean Healthcare. So last Friday I put on the headset and rang more>>

Streamlining Eye Surgery: Innovation in India

In the October 11, 2004 issue of BusinessWeek (The Innovation Economy issue, page 176) there was an interesting article providing an example of Lean thinking applied to healthcare. India has a high number of well-educated engineers and scientists. India is becoming a providers of services such as call centers and more>>

Lean Fundamental: Do Today's Work Today

Recent examples from clients struggling with non-Lean scheduling methods reminded me of the importance of a fundamental principle of Lean - "do today's work today". This means no late deliveries, capacity equal to demand, and no overproduction. It's really a basic philosophy of business but it's harder than it seems. more>>

Lean Customer Service

There's an often-cited Harvard Business Review statistic that goes something like "Developing a new client relationship costs between six to eight times more than maintaining an existing relationship". Spending six times more on customer retention does not sound Lean. For review, Lean can be boiled down to three rules: #1: more>>

Applying Flow to Healthcare

The consultants in our Lean Healthcare practice are speaking with an increasing number of hospitals and healthcare organizations interested in Lean. As we all know, healthcare costs are high and patient wait times are long. Anyone who has had experience sitting in a waiting room, examination room, or in a more>>

Attacking Waste in Knowledge Work

There are 7 types of waste, according to Taiichi Ohno. Attacking these 7 wastes is what makes a company Lean and able to create more value faster. This is also true in the office. Most waste in the factory is easy to spot. Things such as inventory, motion, and defects more>>