At last week’s Shingo Prize conference, I was very excited to meet Dr. Stephen Covey (my podcast is here), but I was just as excited, if not more so, to meet Dr. Brent James, the noted healthcare quality expert from…
Here’s yet another article with the lazy “Lean and Mean” cliche’ in the headline: “Make Your Physician Practice a Lean, Mean Healing Machine.” Real Lean isn’t mean toward patients or staff or physicians. It’s a shame the headline had to…
The idea of “surgical robots” is an interesting one. As a Lean guy, I’m naturally somewhat skeptical of technology – not to be a Luddite, but GM was the company that wanted the high-tech lights-out robotic factory (a vision that…
I heard a great line from an Emergency Department doc and physician leader yesterday. Talking about his hospital’s Lean efforts, he said, simply: “Data should create light, not heat.” Brilliant. Simply brilliant. What he meant was that data should be…
Something Lean is in the water in Wisconsin, as that state is one of the hotbeds of Lean healthcare. There’s, of course, the ThedaCare story (from Appleton) and the upcoming book about their journey (“On the Mend: Revolutionizing Healthcare to…
I’m sitting here on a Sunday morning, drinking a cup of coffee I made at home with bottled water. Why bottled water? Because of a massive water main burst west of Boston – Boston and 30+ other communities currently have…
When I was in Sweden in late January, I had a chance to visit the Capio Saint Göran Hospital in Stockholm. I saw many amazing things, including Lean practices and culture. I haven’t taken the time to write about this yet,…
I’m a bit hesitant to blog about a bad experience with a doctor’s office and waiting time. There are multiple “draft” posts I’ve started to write, left saved out there without being published, as it seems a bit like a…
I will try to be careful with this topic, since I’m obviously not a doctor. Criticism of doctors gets thrown around pretty easily around many hospitals, too much so, I think. You sometimes hear blanket criticisms about doctors being difficult,…
The final keynote talk at the recent Society for Health Systems / ASQ Healthcare conference was given by Dr. Barry Silbaugh, a former hospital executive and the current CEO of the ACPE – The American College of Physician Executives. Silbaugh…
I just finished Dr. Atul Gawande’s latest book, The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right. I believe that this book is the single most important book of the year for ANY Lean leader, not just people working in healthcare.…
Note from 2026: I first published this in 2010. The idea that Lean is loving care came from clinicians at St. Elisabeth Hospital in Tilburg, the Netherlands, and it has held up better than most of what I wrote that…
