All posts from Mark Graban’s LeanBlog.org, including podcasts, announcements, articles, and more.
TL;DR: A 1966 magazine exposé documented widespread, preventable patient harm caused by system failures in American hospitals. While some areas have improved, many of the same problems–errors, infections, lack of transparency, and blame instead of learning–still persist today. Three or…
TL;DR: Leaders lose sleep because they react to every up and down in their metrics. Most fluctuations are just noise. Process Behavior Charts help filter noise, identify real signals, and focus leadership attention on meaningful improvement instead of constant firefighting.…
I hope you’ll join me to view a KaiNexus webinar that I’m hosted today. The topic is near and dear to my heart (as well as to others at KaiNexus): collaboration, learning, sharing. Effective Collaboration Across Organizations and Industries Our…
I saw this headline the other day about University Medical Center in Lubbock, Texas: “UMC finds savings through waste“ The headline really should say “through waste reduction.” Reducing waste is, of course, a good thing. Reducing waste usually saves money…
Today’s blog post is about airplane food. It’s not about the quality of airplane food… it’s not an SNL Seinfeld-ish “what’s the deal with airplane food?” rant, if you remember that classic sketch. As I’ve sometimes blogged about, I fly…
Last week, I mentioned it was the 25th anniversary of TSSC — formerly known as the Toyota Supplier Support Center (it’s now called the Toyota Production System Support Center). TSSC helped Children’s Health in Dallas learn how to reduce CLABSI…
If this post is a bit of a rant, I apologize. The problems here are avoidable and fixable. That’s one reason I get so fired up about patient safety. Patient harm is not an unavoidable natural disaster, like a hurricane.…
One book about the late, great W. Edwards Deming that's been on my shelf for a while is The Deming Management Method, which was written by Mary Walton, a journalist who spent some time with Dr. Deming in the 1980s. There's a section that really made me think about Lean over the past few decades (and it might seem familiar to those who use Six Sigma or other methods).
Joining me again for Episode #288 is Dean Gruner, MD, the recently retired CEO of ThedaCare, a health system in Wisconsin that has long been considered a worldwide leader in the practice of Lean in healthcare.
Recently, in Episode #286, Dean shared his reflections on his work and ThedaCare's "Lean journey." Today, the topic is Accountable Care Organizations and other bigger-picture healthcare reform topics.
Dean was also previously my guest in Episodes 119 and 144.
I'm including a full transcript along with a three-page PDF summary, as I've been doing recently.
I posted an article on LinkedIn last week as a companion article and summary of my podcast with Dean Gruner, MD, the recently retired CEO of ThedaCare.
That article:
"A Retired Hospital CEO Shares the Employee Feedback That was 'A Bucket of Cold Water to the Face.'"
There have been over 125 comments so far... but one has me scratching my head.
It read:
"I looked at deploying Lean within our PNO, and ultimately decided against it, in part for two reasons:
because Lean is about doing the same thing, albeit better and
it is not as much customer/outwardly focused as we need in healthcare."
Lean is not customer/outwardly focused? I hope this isn't a widespread perception or belief out there. I hope I'm overreacting to something that's not really a problem... but I wrote the post anyway.
Just a quick announcement here. If you’re a regular blog reader, you might know about the “ExperienceChange” change management simulation and workshop that I facilitate. See my past blog posts about this workshop and the valuable lessons learned. I normally…
"Through a collaboration with Toyota, Children's HealthSM, the leading pediatric health system in North Texas, announced today it has successfully reduced rates of central line-associated blood stream infections (CLABSIs) by 75 percent with patients in the gastroenterology unit."
