In recent years, there’s been a movement away from having first-year residents work such long grueling hours – 24 hour shifts or longer, multiple days in a row on call, etc. The idea was that fatigued residents were making poor…
tl;dr: “Best Doctors” lists often mislead patients–the fine print literally says they don’t prove who’s best. These rankings boost marketing revenue, not medical quality. Until transparent outcome data is available, patients are choosing based on popularity, not performance. Here is…
My guest for episode #163 is Dr. Gregory R. Johnson, the Chief Medical Officer at Parkview Health in Fort Wayne, Indiana. In this episode, we talk about how Parkview is using Lean to cope with today’s challenging environment, how Dr.…
Listen My guest for podcast #160 is Joseph S. Guarisco, M.D., FAAEM, FACEP. Dr. Guarisco is currently Chairman of the Department of Emergency Medicine and System Chief of Emergency Services for the Ochsner Health System. Dr. Guarisco is a keynote…
As we enter the new year, it’s a great time to reflect back on 2012 – what worked and what didn’t work… what do we plan to do differently in 2013? Those are some of the core questions found on…
If you liked my January 2011 podcast with Jack Billi, MD, from the University of Michigan Health System and Medical School, be sure to check out this free webinar on Monday, December 10, delivered by MIT: Lean Thinking in an…
Here is a commentary that was written by Gary S. Kaplan, MD, the CEO of Virginia Mason Medical Center: “The Lean Approach to Health Care: Safety, Quality, and Cost.” More than a decade ago, Kaplan and the team at VMMC…
Updated 11/8 to include a link to the recording and changing the post to past tense. Gregory Jacobson, MD, co-founder and CEO of KaiNexus (disclosure: I’m on the management team) gave a free webinar next Tuesday, November 6 at 3…
Mark’s note: Today’s guest post is by Dr. Mark Jaben, an emergency medicine physician who has also been working with KaiNexus. If you drive along Highway 19 near Fayetteville, West Virginia, you’re likely to drive across the bridge traversing…
Yesterday was an outstanding day at the Northeast Shingo Prize Conference in Worcester, Massachusetts – my first time attending and speaking at this event. It’s always great to see Bruce Hamilton (of “Toast Kaizen” fame) and the rest of the…
Picking up a feature I was doing a few months back, the backlog of stuff I’ve read and wanted to blog about has grown… that inventory becomes this post. Here are links to some varied articles I’ve read recently that…
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…
