Tag: Canada

Operational Excellence Mixtape: May 8, 2020

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Thanks as always to Ryan McCormick for this... Healthcare - Creating Value for Patients Lean is being blamed for exacerbating pandemic responses due to a lack of capacity...

Operational Excellence Mixtape: April 10, 2020

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Thanks as always to Ryan McCormick for this... Healthcare - Creating Value for Patients Healthcare and hospital staff around the world are working tirelessly to provide...

Operational Excellence Mixtape: March 13, 2020

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Healthcare - Creating Value for Patients Running controlled experiments for evaluating interventions in healthcare is usually infeasible - the presentation of patients can be random...

Operational Excellence Mixtape: February 28, 2020

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Healthcare - Creating Value for Patients Developing a culture of patient safety requires the ability to raise risks without fear of reprisal.  This post from leanblog.org...

Operational Excellence Mixtape: February 14, 2020

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Healthcare - Creating Value for Patients "We have a good people in a bad system".  Here's an excellent interview with Dr. Marty Makary, author of "The...

Episode #12 of the “Lean Whiskey” Podcast: Canadian Whiskey, the Ups...

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In Episode 12 of Lean Whiskey, Mark Graban is back and he's joined by a friend from the Lean healthcare world, Ryan McCormack. Jamie...

Podcast #333 – Jean-Marc Legentil and Marc-Olivier Legentil, The Toyota Kata...

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My guests for Episode #333 are Jean-Marc Legentil and Marc-Olivier Legentil, father-and-son Lean consultants from Montreal, Quebec, Canada. They work together in the firm...

“ER wait times down, but only slightly” or ER wait times...

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This article was sent by a friend and blog reader from Winnipeg the other day: "ER wait times down, but only slightly" Oh good, the waiting times are down. But what does "only slightly" mean? Have ER wait times gone down in a meaningful way? Or are they just comparing two data points? Is this "down" a matter a signal or is it just noise in the system? These are the types of questions that can be answered by methods in my new book Measures of Success: React Less, Lead Better, Improve More.

Podcast #307 – Andre DeMerchant, “You Can’t Cut Your Way to...

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Joining me for Episode #307 of the podcast is my friend Andre DeMerchant, the President of DeMerchant Healthcare Solutions Inc., based in Kitchener, Ontario. We first crossed paths when we had the chance to work together with an American healthcare client via our then-affiliation with Pascal Dennis and Lean Pathways.  In today's episode, we talk about Andre's history working for Toyota in Canada and what he learned there -- and why it's important that he learned about "how flow works" at Toyota. We chat about the terms "Lean" and "The Toyota Production System" and what those words mean to him. How does TPS "transcend culture and language," as well as industries? We then shift to talking about healthcare and some of the common challenges, including "financial hardships," that are faced in many countries. Why are hospitals "poorly prepared for change" in many cases? Another main theme is "cost cutting" and why you can't cut your way to success. 

How NOT to Improve Patient Flow: Laws, Targets, Blame, and Threats

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Let's start by stating the obvious: it sucks to wait 24 hours or more on a stretcher in an emergency department hallway waiting for a real hospital bed. It's sad and frustrating to have a couple of blog readers from Canada send me this story from Quebec: Quebec wants 24-hour cap for patients waiting on stretchers in ERs Barrette says there would be consequences for hospital staff, doctors who don't comply I think there's agreement that waiting 24 hours, 12 hours, or four hours for a bed after an admission is a problem. That's a problem worth working on.

My Webinar Recording: Standardize What Makes Sense…

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Today at 3 PM, I'm doing a webinar at the invitation of the BC Patient Safety & Quality Council, as part of their "Quality Café" series. Thanks for the invitation! It's open to the public and it's titled: "Standardize What Makes Sense... Then Engage Everybody in Improving What You Standardized" I hope you can join us...

Congratulations on Reducing Waiting Times, But Lean Isn’t Just About Flow...

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I'm always happy to see success stories where healthcare organizations solve problems that matter through Lean concepts, practices, and principles. Today, I'm blogging about...