Tag: Healthcare

I'm teaching a daylong class on Lean healthcare today in San Antonio. It's something I've done twice a year for the past four years...

My guests for Episode #289 are Kathleen Sharp, MBOE, LSS MBB, now the Director of Optimization at McLeod Health, and David Schoenwetter, D.O., FACEP, a Medical Director at Geisinger Health System. They are joining me to talk about the innovative Geisinger Mobile Health Paramedic program that they developed and piloted with Lean thinking throughout. Kathleen and David will discuss why it was important to engage stakeholders in innovation, how they viewed and addressed resistance to change, why it was important to test the idea in practice, and why it was important to measure results. They also discuss their lessons learned and their challenges along the way. This WSJ article has a nice summary of the program: "Paramedics Aren't Just for Emergencies." "In the Geisinger pilot program, mobile health visits can be requested by a patient's primary-care doctor, a cardiology clinic, or after an emergency room or hospital discharge. Patients who frequently visit the ER are offered the option of being seen at home by a paramedic as an alternative to an ER visit and potential hospital admission, especially for conditions that can be treated at home if caught early." I hope you enjoy the episode. It's long, but it's an interesting case study, I believe.

Thanks to those of you who sent me this HBR article: Doctors Feel Excluded from Health Care Value Efforts Long story short... brought to you by...

In the past year or two, it seems like I have heard more about people and organizations leading Lean study trips to Japan. This...

I'm not looking for a traditional, full-time job, but a lot of job postings cross my path, as people are looking for referrals. A...

it's great to see an 11 year old thinking like an engineer and an entrepreneur. He's the son of a Toyota "operational excellence" consultant. For those who try to unfortunately equate Lean to a "clean desk policy," the father's desk is a great argument against banning family photos and an illustration of why Lean isn't about putting tape around everything...

One of the phrases and concepts that I love from Eric Ries and The Lean Startup is the idea of "success theater," which describes the efforts...

Three or four months ago, in the midst of a discussion on LinkedIn about patient safety, somebody made reference to a 1966 cover story...

I saw this headline the other day about University Medical Center in Lubbock, Texas: "UMC finds savings through waste" The headline really should say "through waste...

If this post is a bit of a rant, I apologize. The problems here are avoidable and fixable. That's one reason I get so...

I posted an article on LinkedIn last week as a companion article and summary of my podcast with Dean Gruner, MD, the recently retired CEO of ThedaCare. That article: "A Retired Hospital CEO Shares the Employee Feedback That was 'A Bucket of Cold Water to the Face.'" There have been over 125 comments so far... but one has me scratching my head. It read: "I looked at deploying Lean within our PNO, and ultimately decided against it, in part for two reasons: because Lean is about doing the same thing, albeit better and it is not as much customer/outwardly focused as we need in healthcare." Lean is not customer/outwardly focused? I hope this isn't a widespread perception or belief out there. I hope I'm overreacting to something that's not really a problem... but I wrote the post anyway.

"Through a collaboration with Toyota, Children's HealthSM, the leading pediatric health system in North Texas, announced today it has successfully reduced rates of central line-associated blood stream infections (CLABSIs) by 75 percent with patients in the gastroenterology unit."