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Joe Swartz on Champions of Change, Kaizen, and Healthcare Supply Chains

This podcast is sponsored by Cardinal Health.

Joining me again for episode #301 of the podcast is Joe Swartz, my friend and co-author for our books Healthcare Kaizen and The Executive Guide to Healthcare Kaizen:. You can learn more about our books here. He also contributed a chapter to the book Practicing Lean. (read an excerpt).

Today, we're talking about "Champions of Change," as I've been writing about for Cardinal Health.

How Standard Should Standard Improvement Boards Be?

Guest Post by Joe Swartz: At Franciscan Health, we were struggling to create a system-wide standard for our improvement boards. Although we had deployed them to over 50 departments across our 14 hospitals, it has been a struggle to agree on what the boards should look like. Five of our hospitals used rows for each key metric while nine of our hospitals used columns for each key metric. However, now our leadership was asking us to become more standardized across our system.

It’s Exciting to See an “Idea Board” at Buffalo Trace Distillery

Thanks to posting about the trip on LinkedIn, I learned that Mike Bukowski is now working for Sazerac, the parent company of Buffalo Trace, in a process improvement role. Last year, Mike attended the site visit and class that Joe Swartz and I hosted at Franciscan St. Francis Health.

Mike has embraced might call "lessons from Toyota," as taught to healthcare people, and is now training and coaching people who make some very fine bourbon, including Aaron Krentz, Processing Supervisor (at right).