DailyKaizen » What the patient is willing to pay for How about this for a circular (almost) network of blogs? I’m linking to a post on the excellent “Daily Kaizen” lean healthcare blog, which was referencing a post on the…
WSJ Article: Faltering Family M.D.s Get Technology Lifeline While I was skeptical of Intel’s planned tablet PC for nurses, I’m much more positive in my first reaction to this WSJ article about small (or single MD) physician practices using technology…
Business Week Article Here’s a good story about how some doctors offices are trying to reduce backlogs and appointment delays, by adopting lean and operations management methods. As the head of a large primary care department at a Kaiser Permanente…
… and the system sucks!” That was the final line of a recent episode of ER that we just watched last night (thanks to the DVR). The major focus of the episode was a patient in court with a claim…
Healthcare Efficiency: Lean and Mean Here is a short blog piece on the American Society for Quality website, written by a doctor. It’s positive about lean, which makes me cringe at the ole’ “Lean and Mean” title. I presume that…
Ark. Hospital, Surgeon Sued For Performing Unnecessary Heart Surgeries When I teach lean overview training in healthcare settings, it’s often tough to find examples of the Waste of “Overprocessing,” one of the types of waste that Toyota has defined and…
One of the core ideas of the Toyota Production System is the recognition that people are indeed human and are therefore fallible (part of the “respect for humanity” tenet of TPS). No amount of “be careful” warnings will prevent all…
I don’t think I’m smart enough to figure out the root cause of this healthcare dysfunction. I went to the dentist this morning and the office manager said “Aetna still hasn’t paid for your last visit”. This was five months…
MedQIC – Patient-Centered Care Supported by an EHR The link above (and this audio-video presentation with similar content) tell an amazing story of a private practice family physician who has a “single patient flow” process in his office. This doctor…
theledger.com Talk about not learning from your mistakes. There are so many simple ways of error proofing surgery, including having procedures in place to confirm the right patient is on the table and that the right surgery is about to…
Serious errors by doctor, nurse reported at St. Mary’s Medical Center This kind of article is published far too often, but this statistic is alarming: “Doctors operating on the wrong body part have been a rare but persistent problem. In…
WSJ.com – The Doctor’s Office (free feature): “Most medical errors in the doctor’s office are process errors. These result from communication problems, office administration problems, incorrect medical test reports and decisions based on incomplete information. Many process errors are minor…
