The more I visit different hospitals, the more I tend to roll my eyes at the different signs that aim to remind staff and/or visitors to follow proper hand hygiene practices. These signs are often part of an arms race…
This is free app that’s brought to you by a coalition of lean bloggers. Learn more about it or download it directly from the iTunes Store or the Android Marketplace. A number of us combined efforts to provide this as a…
In honor of Veterans’ Day (in the U.S.) and Remembrance Day (in Canada, where I spent most of the last two weeks, often wearing a poppy pin), let’s pause to honor those who have served their country. Let’s also maybe…
It’s been nice to see the “lean design” approach taking hold in healthcare over the past few years. I think the first book on the subject was a “manifesto” by an architect, David Chambers: Efficient Healthcare – Overcoming Broken Paradigms.…
Congrats to Eric Ries as his book The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses officially goes on sale today. I will post a formal review once I have read the entire book (disclosure:…
Dr. Richard Shannon shares how Lean and Toyota-inspired methods dramatically reduced hospital-acquired infections at Allegheny General and the University of Pennsylvania. This episode explores leadership, standardized work, and why disciplined problem solving saves lives and reduces costs. Podcast #127 is…
Listen: This episode is a conversation with Paul Akers, founder and president of FastCap LLC, based in Bellingham, WA. FastCap is an international product development company founded in 1997 with over 2000 distributors worldwide. Paul and FastCap have also embraced…
As I’ve been working on my upcoming second book, Healthcare Kaizen: Engaging Front-Line Staff in Sustainable Improvements, I’ve had “kaizen” (or continuous improvement) on the brain even more than usual. One distinction between kaizen ideas and a traditional “suggestion system” is…
Listen: Today’s episode is a discussion with Mrinalini Gadkari, a Senior Lecturer at the Fisher College of Business. Today, we’re talking about the new Master of Business Operational Excellence (MBOE) for Healthcare Program starting this fall. We’ll talk about how…
Produced in partnership with the Healthcare Value Network, episode #119 is a discussion with Dean Gruner, MD, the president & CEO of ThedaCare. Here, we talk about Strategy Deployment as a Lean management system and how it fits into their ongoing management and improvement efforts in their health system.
TL;DR: W. Edwards Deming taught that organizations don’t need to motivate people–they need to stop demotivating them. Practices like rankings, merit pay, numerical targets without methods, and competition between people crush intrinsic motivation, dignity, and joy in learning over time.…
As Mark Graban stated in a recent post, “People fear or assume that a factory is…mindless, monotonous, repetitive…” These sentiments may come from observation of one aspect of lean and manufacturing: rules and related rewards. There is the common (mis-)perception…
