Thanks to everybody for reading Lean Blog this year! As Christmas approaches, I’m taking off this week and probably next to enjoy time with family and some downtime. I hope you’ve had a successful year and I wish you nothing but the best for 2016...
In this episode, Dr. John Toussaint explains why Lean healthcare transformation fails when it’s treated as a set of tools instead of a leadership responsibility. Drawing on his experience as former CEO of ThedaCare, he discusses CEO accountability, patient safety,…
How many times do we hear people say things like “We don’t have time for Lean” or “We don’t have time for Kaizen“? It happens a lot, right? As I’ve said before (and this video) a “lack of time” is a problem to solve...
This page contains the different "Ask Us Anything!" sessions we’ve done and are continuing to do....
The W. Edwards Deming Institute and Dr. Deming's grandson Kevin Cahill worked with NBC to make the 1980 program available, giving the institute perpetual rights to it (see their blog post). To the institute's credit, they've made this freely available on YouTube.
There’s no magic about the number five. I’ve seen some people write that five is somehow a “magic number.” No, that’s not really the case. Ask why more than once, probably more than twice…
Lean is, of course, not about a better way to build cars. It's a transferrable philosophy, management system, and methodology that is being applied in many different settings and industries, including healthcare. I'm often told (sometimes by somebody who is being sort of huffy): "Patients are not cars." [...]
Through our practice of Lean, we’re looking at processes and our management system, looking to identify waste and opportunities for improvement. Lean is about engaging people to have them ask why we do things a certain way or if things…
I’m going to be attending the Lean Startup Conference in San Francisco next month, as a “faculty member,” a moderator for a session, TBD, and maybe serving as a mentor. The organizers asked me to write a post introducing myself…
The W. Edwards Deming Institute posted a video of Kevin Cahill, a grandson of Dr. Deming, welcoming people to the event and talking about innovation, or the desire that people have for it. But, they don't know what to do...
Today's guest is Eric Dickson,MD, MHCM, FACEP, the president and CEO of UMass Medical Center. Today's podcast is a recording of an interview that I did on stage at the 2015 Lean Healthcare Transformation Summit, as part of the CEO panel I was moderating.
There's a really good article that was published by Modern Healthcare as a special report, written by Sabriya Rice. Sabriya spent a week observing a rapid improvement event (RIE) at the Sts. Mary and Elizabeth Medical Center in Illinois. It's an in depth article that, I think, very accurately reflects the reality that Lean is helpful, but the process isn't easy for a number of reasons.
