Recently, I stumbled across some video of me and Dr. Greg Jacobson giving a talk at a health system. I think it's from 2013. So, I'm sharing this as a "Throwback Thursday."
KaiNexus software has changed and evolved a lot in five years as the company has grown. Kaizen, or continuous improvement, principles and practices are timeless.
Last week, I wrote Part 1 of this piece about TQM and "Small Kaizen" at a Japanese Hospital pharmacy.
The hospital was happy that employees were participating in their "Small Kaizen" process, but there was a month in which they saw the number of submitted Kaizens drop, from about 138 to 58 or so.
As I write about in Measures of Success, two data points usually don't make a trend.
Tonight is the start of the NFL Draft, which almost gets as much coverage nowadays as a Presidential election.
Can you imagine if CNBC and other TV channels spent as much time focusing on which Lean Healthcare prospects would be "drafted" from our leading universities and medical schools?
Here is our exclusive and official Lean Blog mock draft, featuring picks from our Lean Healthcare draft expert, Mel Kaizen, Jr.
I was recently asked to do a recorded video presentation for a medical conference in Turkey. I spoke about the dual pillars of "The Toyota Way":
Respect for People
Continuous Improvement
The video is about 20 minutes, split about half and half on each of those interrelated topics. I'm coming to you from a hotel room, somewhat tired after a day of consulting.
(Slides PDF and transcript also included)
Thanks to my friend Sylvain for sending me this cartoon. It would have been more timely for me to share this before Christmas, but there's an opportunity for improvement.
The cartoon series is called Real Life Adventures by Gary Wise and Lance Aldrich. This particular cartoon appeared on December 13, 2017.
Here's the top part... please click through to their website to see the entire cartoon and I'll talk about it here in this post, sharing links to other blog posts and videos on the topic.
Today's post is written by Steve Hoeft, the SVP, Chief of Operations Excellence at Baylor Scott & White Health (BSWH) here in Texas. This is his first written contribution to Lean Blog, but you might remember him as a guest in episode #226 of my podcast, where he and co-author Dr. Bob Pryor talked about their book The Power of Ideas to Transform Healthcare: Engaging Staff by Building Daily Lean Management Systems.
His article begins: "In my years serving as continuous improvement leader and consultant for some great organizations, I've discovered something consistent: Improvement will not happen on its own."
Today, we’re looking back at a podcast that I did back in 2015 with Alan G. Robinson, PhD, co-author of many books including The Idea-Driven Organization. I’m talking about Kaizen today at the Studer Group annual “What’s Right in Healthcare” conference, so…
I've produced A LOT of content about Kaizen and continuous improvement over the past 11 years, including podcasts and webinars. Somebody asked me to build a "curriculum" and a sequence of podcasts and webinars for people to watch as a way of getting educated about this approach. So this post is an attempt at that...
It's been just over six years since I joined the team at KaiNexus, serving in various capacities over that time. As I like to say, even though I don't work full time with the company, I have a full commitment to the company, the team, and their approach.
The company has grown by leaps and bounds, adding customers not just in healthcare, but in other industries. You can read more about our aggregate customer results here. Recently, our customers just crossed the threshold of a combined one million hours of labor time saved, in addition to over $250 million in financial impact... in addition to quality, safety, customer and employee satisfaction improvements.
Back in 2011, I interviewed the CEO and co-founder of KaiNexus, Dr. Greg Jacobson:
In this post, I share some thoughts and build upon one of the presentations at last week's Lean Healthcare Transformation Summit, where, Tim Pehrson, a regional CEO for Intermountain Healthcare, talked about how they piloted a continuous improvement process in one region... and how they're now spreading it throughout the system. This leads to confusion, in online discussion, about terms like projects, suggestions, ideas, and such...
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?
A reader asks why I got involved with Lean in healthcare. In this post, I share what I wrote about this in the preface to "Lean Hospitals" and I share some additional thoughts and reflections.