Listen: In Episode 39, Mark Graban and Jamie Flinchbaugh toast the completion of Mark’s new book, The Mistakes That Make Us: Cultivating a Culture of Learning and Innovation (coming soon!). Technical note: If you want to skip the whiskey talk,…
Listen: What do you do when you are chosen as Jim Murray’s US Micro Whiskey of the Year? You pop in to join Mark and Jamie on Lean Whiskey to talk about it. At least that’s what our friend David…
Today, I'm giving a talk at the International Society for Blood Transfusion (ISBT) conference in Toronto. I was invited by the company Quotient to participate in a panel presentation and discussion with some laboratory professionals from the U.S. and the U.K.
The others are presenting examples of how they have improved flow, productivity, and quality in blood collection and hospital blood bank settings. Lean often gets portrayed as just being about efficiency or flow, when Toyota's definition of the Toyota Production System talks about how flow and quality go hand in hand.
I was specifically asked to give a short talk titled, "What Do Cars Have to Do With Healthcare? How to Adopt and Adapt Lessons From Manufacturing."
Let's start by stating the obvious: it sucks to wait 24 hours or more on a stretcher in an emergency department hallway waiting for a real hospital bed. It's sad and frustrating to have a couple of blog readers from Canada send me this story from Quebec:
Quebec wants 24-hour cap for patients waiting on stretchers in ERs
Barrette says there would be consequences for hospital staff, doctors who don't comply
I think there's agreement that waiting 24 hours, 12 hours, or four hours for a bed after an admission is a problem. That's a problem worth working on.
Back in 2012, I blogged twice about aspects of Dr. Donald M. Berwick's 1989 article in the New England Journal of Medicine titled “Continuous Improvement as an Ideal in Health Care.” The full text is only available to subscribers.
As I posted on LinkedIn, another aspect of this article caught my eye when I was reviewing it the other day in advance of my talk at the Studer Group "What's Right in Healthcare" conference next week.
Last month, I saw this article from the publication Hospitals & Health Networks (H&HN), where they summarized a speech given by the legendary Dr. Don Berwick at the National Patient Safety Foundation annual conference: Don Berwick’s 7 Roadblocks to Improving…
In the article posted today, Pamela Hartzband, M.D., and Jerome Groopman, M.D. (the later the author of the popular book How Doctors Think), rant about all sorts of things… some of which have nothing to do with Lean...
One of the first people in healthcare to be influenced by Deming’s work is Dr. Don Berwick, founder of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (at right in that picture). Berwick wrote about Deming’s ideas back in...
Today’s Throwback Thursday is a look back at a 1993 book that I purchased in 2011 on somebody’s recommendation. It was probably one of those used books you can buy for a penny on Amazon… Creating the New American Hospital: A…
My blog will turn 10 years old in February 2015. You’re probably either thinking, “Wow, that’s awesome!” or “Get a life, dude.” :-) Here’s a look back at some of the posts from August 6 in past years… what was…
Last week, while flying back from my trip to Japan, I watched a video that had been recommended to me a few times (including by my local San Antonio IHI Open School friends): “Escape Fire: The Fight to Rescue American…
Last week, I blogged about the 1989 New England Journal of Medicine article by Dr. Donald M. Berwick, “Continuous Improvement as an Ideal in Health Care.” Dr. Berwick wrote that kaizen (as continuous improvement) is not alien to healthcare, as…
