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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...
I enjoy “gemba visits” (of sorts) to wineries and vacations often focus on this walking, tasting, and learning. I usually read the wine column that’s in the Wall St. Journal each Saturday, and this one stood out to me: “Do…
Back in 2012, I blogged twice about aspects of Dr. Donald M. Berwick's 1989 article in the New England Journal of Medicine titled “Continuous Improvement as an Ideal in Health Care.” The full text is only available to subscribers.
As I posted on LinkedIn, another aspect of this article caught my eye when I was reviewing it the other day in advance of my talk at the Studer Group "What's Right in Healthcare" conference next week.
I'm excited to be attending the annual Lean Coaching Summit today through Thursday in Austin. If you're there, please say hi! Today, I've registered to take a class on a topic that I've taken an interest in over the past few years: "Motivational Interviewing," or MI for short. I'm hoping to learn more about coaching people through their stages of "change talk," as related to Lean and organizational change... and that's what today's post is about.
There are Dr. W. Edwards Deming quotes that get thrown around... one that sounds incredibly "pro-data" and others that say data and measures are not the only thing... which is it? How do you reconcile that?
A few of you sent me this sad article from the Wall St. Journal:
"'People Are Dying Here': Federal Hospitals Fail Tribes."
I feel like I've some variation of this article and exposé many times over. Sometimes, it's some form of government medicine (active duty military medicine, the VA, or another country) or it's a similar sad story from the private healthcare sector (be it non-profit or for-profit).
Another in the series of "do words matter?" posts... do phrases like "Lean Transformation" resonate as much as "Business Transformation?"
In this post, I write about a phrase that I heard many times when visiting Franciscan St. Francis Health in Indianapolis. How can this phrase help us challenge ourselves and to find positive solutions instead of barriers and obstacles?
At the recent Lean Healthcare Transformation Summit, there were thought provoking presentations... and we had many discussions about the role of incremental improvement vs. redesign or transformation. And, lots of discussions about imitating vs. innovating... so I explore those themes in this post.
If we're going to practice Kaizen (continuous improvement), do the words matter? Should we call it a Kaizen Card or something else? Do we start with a "problem" or something else? Are we writing down "ideas" or "countermeasures?" Does it matter?
What if "easier" is less safe? Great question. It begs the question of why Safer isn't first in Shingo's list? Is it because safety is assumed to be such a fundamental pre-condition in the Toyota culture or the Lean approach? Safety is such a non-negotiable point that it doesn't need to be said?
Does your healthcare organization struggle with keeping hand sanitizer dispensers full? Let me know what you think of this "two-bin kanban" system prototype from a vendor that might more forward on this...
