Have you heard of Lean Healthcare? I am sure that many of you have done it and that quite
few have not. The concept of lean healthcare has been embraced by manufacturers.
The idea of lean manufacturing and lean service are most visibly displayed by
Toyota Motor Corporation. Toyota has refined and developed both the techniques
that organizations around the world are using their ideas to improve their own
organization and compare with Toyota.
Lean Healthcare basically consists of reducing waste in the provision of services both directly to
the patient and internal customers, such as human resource services for
employees. For example, lean techniques help eliminate duplicate procedures,
like a nurse taking a patient’s blood pressure and then the doctor doing the
Same a few minutes later. He also makes sure that all tools and
products are in an exam room when needed. It is beyond the scope of this
article to fully describe lean health care; Many books have been written about it. In
In fact, the American Society of Quality in its online bookstore has several titles,
including Lean-Six Sigma for health care. I would like to define some techniques.
However, it is found in Lean Healthcare to illustrate its value.
One of the most used tools is the Value Stream Mapping. VSM is displayed in a
physical graphic the process from the beginning to the end of the delivery of a service or
procedure to identify wasted effort or steps that do not add value to the
results. For example, in the April 2005 issue of Quality Progress, the article Lean Six
Sigma Reduces Medication Errors presents the process by which a team of nurses
and pharmacists in a hospital setting reduced waiting time and errors in
Delivery of medicines from the pharmacy to the patient. By using VSM and
other statistical techniques, the error rate was reduced from 0.33% to 0.14% in 5
months and a savings of $550,000 was achieved.
Lean Healthcare emphasizes leveraging employee knowledge to improve processes.
Leaders in an organization empower employees to come up with ideas for improvement
and then enact the promising ones to save time, money and improve the patient
health and satisfaction. One such technique for empowering employees is
kaizen. This is a staff meeting to quickly generate solutions to a process that
has been identified as needing improvement; team members are representatives
of those actually involved in the process. A kaizen event is marked as a brief,
intense effort to solve such a problem. It may take several hours or a day or two.
The lost work time of the kaizen members is more than compensated by the
meeting results.
Lean Healthcare is driven by the identified needs of the patient or client. For
For example, waiting time is considered waste. A patient who has to wait more than a day or
two to see a doctor for an office appointment is a waste. Many in health care think
that this is a problem that is almost impossible to solve. it is not solutions to this
problem have been described in several articles in Family Practice Management, a
Publication of the American Academy of Family Physicians. Ideas are easily
adopted to sites that are not primary care physician practices.
Lean identifies the best techniques and strategies to deliver quality care and then
makes them a standard operating procedure. In fact, it’s a good idea to write a
manual of the best processes so that any employee can consult at any time
and also in order to use it as a training tool for new employees.
I would like to urge you to delve into the ideas of lean healthcare. There is
many publications describe it, such as the ASQ publication mentioned above. the april
The 2006 edition of Family Practice Management has an excellent article for lean in the medical office.
office; can be found for free online. Your efforts in implementing Lean techniques
it will be rewarding for both you and your patients.
