Naida Grunden

A professional writer for over 20 years, Naida Grunden has spent the last decade documenting Lean/Toyota improvements in the health care setting. Ms. Grunden also shares an interest in applying what has been learned in aviation safety and reliability to healthcare. In addition to writing numerous general and academic articles, Ms. Grunden wrote the book, The Pittsburgh Way to Efficient Healthcare: Improving Patient Care Using Toyota Based Methods, which describes the work of the Pittsburgh Regional Health Initiative (PRHI), a small nonprofit organization, which began in 2001 to pilot Lean experiments in competing hospitals across Southwestern Pennsylvania. The effort produced some of the first genuine, on-the-ground evidence that a Toyota-based industrial model could work in health care.