I had the opportunity to finally meet “e-Patient Dave” at the HIMSS conference about 10 days ago, where he spoke on the topic of patient involvement and the patient’s right to their own medical data. As he describes on his website, Dave beat stage 4 kidney cancer, thanks to clinicians and staff at Boston’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, where Paul Levy (of the “Running a Hospital” blog) is CEO. Dave is a frequent commenter on Paul’s blog, which is where I first ran across him. Dave and Paul share connections back to their days at MIT.

This week, BIDMC has been holding their annual Lean and Quality Improvement Retreat, a week of training and exercises held primarily for residents (along with nurses and some managers and staff). What a great investment of time and what a great educational opportunity — here is one at example, at least, that runs counter to the report this week from Lucian Leape that medical schools aren’t doing enough to teach patient safety concepts and team skills.

Dave and I were both able to participate, in different ways, in that retreat this week…

I was able to be there Monday morning, to see and hear some of the introductory Lean discussion and the questions that the residents had about Lean. I also gave a talk about Lean over their working lunch.

e-Patient Dave was there for the whole week. In fact, he was one of TWO patients who participated in the learning, discussion, and value stream analysis activities. Here’s a picture of the two of us, at left.

Since Lean is a very customer-focused philosophy, it’s really outstanding that BIDMC has real patient voices involved here, actively participating. Other healthcare organizations, like ThedaCare, have patients directly participating in week-long kaizen events – another best practice, I’d say.

Dave blogged about each day of the retreat. I’m going to share the links and invite you read and comment, either here or on Dave’s blog. I’ve had a few good chats with Dave – he’s very enthusiastic about Lean because it’s patient-focused and he’s the type of guy who is just wired in a way where Lean makes sense. It’s intuitive based on his previous business career – but now Dave is a full-time advocate for patients and “e-patients.” Check out his site, as he has a lot of videos and presentations, including “Gimme my damn data.”

• Participating in my hospital’s Lean quality improvement retreat
• Lean retreat, day 2
• Lean retreat, day 3: The Pig Game (learning about standardized work)
• Lean retreat, day 4: Synchronize / align, and the House of Lean
• Lean retreat, day 5: Reporting to leadership, taking it back to gemba

And I’m sure there will be a post for the final day today, I’ll add that here, as well.

About LeanBlog.org: Mark Graban is a consultant, author, and speaker in the “lean healthcare” methodology, focused on improving quality and patient safety, improving access, reducing costs, and fully engaging healthcare professionals. He is also the Chief Improvement Officer for KaiNexus.

Tagged as: BIDMC, Healthcare, Kaizen, Leape, ThedaCare