It's great to have Dr. John Toussaint back for episode #184 of the podcast (see links to previous episodes below). He is, of course, CEO of the ThedaCare Center for Healthcare Value and the author of two Shingo Award-winning books, On the Mend: Revolutionizing Healthcare to Save Lives and Transform the Industry and Potent Medicine: The Collaborative Cure for Healthcare.
In this podcast, we start by hearing John's thoughts on some of the top issues that healthcare CEOs are facing today, such as changes in payment structures and Accountable Care Organizations. We also talk about the “Enduring Excellence” program that Paul O'Neill and John are leading to teach healthcare senior leaders about Lean culture change and their important role.
This podcast was produced in conjunction with the Healthcare Value Network as a continuation of their previous podcast series.
For a link to this episode, refer people to www.leanblog.org/184.
Past episodes with Dr. Toussaint:
- #159: (10/16/12) John Toussaint, MD on the new IOM report
- #146: (5/2/12) John Toussaint MD, on his new book Potent Medicine
- #72: (8/12/09) John Toussaint, MD, Lean and Health Reform
- #62: (2/23/09) John Toussaint, MD, ThedaCare Center for Healthcare Value
- #54: (12/2/08) John Toussaint, MD, ThedaCare's Lean Journey
Here is a video where “Enduring Excellence” participants share their reflections:
For earlier episodes, visit the main Podcast page, which includes information on how to subscribe via RSS or via Apple Podcasts.
You can also listen via Stitcher.
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If you have feedback on the podcast, or any questions for me or my guests, you can email me at leanpodcast@gmail.com or you can call and leave a voicemail by calling the “Lean Line” at (817) 993-0630 or contact me via Skype id “mgraban”. Please give your location and your first name. Any comments (email or voicemail) might be used in follow ups to the podcast.
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Great podcast!
Dr. Toussaint talked about the handful of Lean skills that a CEO has to have. It would be fun to know what that handful consists of.
A useful article that will provide you with some of this information can be found here:
LINK (PDF)
And this executive summary of another article describes how you can obtain a copy of another full article:
LINK (PDF)
Thanks Mike for sharing. I’m looking forward to Dr. Toussaint’s follow-up. My own list is:
Provide direction and alignment
Get rid of the overburden
Provide stability
Demonstrate structured problem solving
Develop employees through structured coaching
Enable teamwork at all levels
Personal assessment
Continuous learning
Organizational communication
Change leadership
Wow, that’s all! There are some personal behaviors that Dr. Toussaint has talked about that need to be in place before skills.
Great list. My post today is about our webinar last week about 25 leadership behaviors that create a culture of continuous improvement and many (all?) should be practiced by CEOs as well.
Here is John’s blog post about CEO skills:
CEO standard work for successful lean implementation
Today, I was listening intently to Dr Toussaint’s interview and was encouraged when he mentioned Atrius, yet discouraged to hear him say that Atrius had “gotten a little worse” in their ACO performance even though they are doing good things in Lean. A couple points need clarified:
>> 1) They are not “worse” – Please see link to the article where Dr Lindsey explains this
>> 2) It is also important to note that not all groups of Atrius have adopted Lean as their transformational approach. Harvard Vanguard was the Pioneer of Atrius’ Lean work and they represent about 90% of Atrius’ Lean efforts. In actuality, THEIR ACO results were a reduction in cost of this population of 4.5%. This number is comparable to John’s communication of Thedacare results, but even more impressive given that Harvard Vanguard is a multi-specialty group practice faced with negotiating with hospitals on lengths of stay, admits, and re-admits .
>> 3) Atrius quality results for this year were reported to them by CMS as “spectacular” when compared to other Pioneer participants.
Thanks for allowing me to share.