Mark’s Note: I’ve known Ryan McCormack for many years now, thanks to his previous work in Lean healthcare and his attendance at Lean Healthcare Transformation Summit events. He’s been sending out an excellent curated email on Operational Excellence. Click here to sign up to receive them via Substack (these are separate from any Lean Blog emails you might receive). I asked Ryan if I could archive these emails to give them a more permanent home on the web… and he agreed. Thanks!
Insights about improvement, innovation, and leadership… Dear Readers, Covid-19 has disrupted the world. We have been thrust into a situation where we are required to rapidly adapt and innovate, and the stakes have never been higher. Lean principles of continuous improvement…
Healthcare – Creating Value for Patients Running controlled experiments for evaluating interventions in healthcare is usually infeasible – the presentation of patients can be random and most factors are impossible to control. However, experimenters can benefit from the quasi-random assignment…
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 about a nurse who failed to report a critical incident for fear of being immediately…
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 Price We Pay”, on how to address the challenges of the US Healthcare system. Who knows…
Healthcare – Creating Value for Patients It’s been more than 10 years since Atul Gawande wrote The Checklist Manifesto, showing the world that a simple 2-minute checklist prior to surgery resulted in fewer deaths. Adoption is “pretty spotty”, and in…
Healthcare – Creating Value for Patients Sometimes you just need to get a team together and improve. Here’s a good example of use of A3 thinking to improve opioid prescribing in outpatient rheumatology. Reducing harm requires the conditions to speak up, raise…
Here are the most clicked articles of the last half of 2019 mixtapes: Many of you were interested in links with interesting questions about operational excellence: How Can There Be Standards in a Service Job When No Two Instances Are The…
Healthcare – Creating Value for Patients It’s been 20 years since To Err is Human, the seminal report from the Institute of Medicine, was released, estimating, to many people’s surprise, that almost 100,000 deaths per year in hospitals could be prevented. …
Healthcare – Creating Value for Patients Does Lean “work” in hospitals in the US? Sort of, according to the Journal of Healthcare Management. There is evidence that Lean improves efficiency and financial performance, but little evidence to support improvements in patient…
Healthcare – Creating Value for Patients Healthcare improvement is often done through QI projects in an “artisan” fashion. To improve healthcare improvement, combat bias and us evidence according to Mary Dixon-Woods. Her article elicited a response in the same publication. One would think…
Healthcare – Creating Value for Patients “Imagine walking into a restaurant and being seated. Sometime after your meal, you receive the check and find an additional charge that was not indicated on the menu or previously mentioned by your waiter.…
Healthcare – Creating Value for Patients If you set a target without providing a clear path on how you want it achieved, and then punish staff when they fail to achieve it, then staff will achieve the target – by any means necessary and…
