Healthcare improvement isn’t about working harder—it’s about better systems, better leadership, and a culture that supports learning and speaking up. This archive brings together blog posts, podcasts, and reflections on Lean healthcare, patient safety, quality improvement, leadership, and continuous improvement. Many of these posts draw on real hospital experiences and lessons from Deming, Toyota, and frontline healthcare teams, with a consistent emphasis on respect for people and learning from mistakes.
My dad was flying back from Seattle last week and he noticed this at the TSA “gemba” in the airport, as he reported in an email: The [TSA] woman’s stamp kept falling of the stand. She said they just got…
Becker’s Hospital Review published a piece about the first 10 years of Lean at Seattle’s Virginia Mason Medical Center: 10 Years Later: Virginia Mason Production System Still Going Strong. The article highlights some of the reasons for the longevity of…
Some of the best lessons I have ever learned for my career are from Donald Wheeler’s brilliant book Understanding Variation: The Key to Managing Chaos. One idea is that data without context is meaningless. The other is the application of…
Here is an article from HealthLeaders Media about the Transforming Care at the Bedside program: “Rural Oregon Hospitals Implement Frontline Caregiver Program.” TCAB is a program that’s similar to the UK NHS program called Releasing Time to Care where nurses…
Here is the second short, simple Kaizen education video from KaiNexus. You can view the first video here and the entire series. We are embedding these videos into our web-based software, to provide short tips and hints for our users. We’re also making…
American hospitals are concerned (understatement!) about their future revenues as healthcare reform gets implemented. I heard one senior executive tell his staff, “We are never going to be paid more for the work that we do than we are today.”…
People in healthcare know that miscommunications are a major cause of errors and patient harm. There was a strange footnote to game 5 of the World Series, where the Texas Rangers beat the St. Louis Cardinals 4-2. A miscommunication led…
Today, I’m sharing a link to some videos our good friend Bob Emiliani has uncovered and posted on his website. Back in November 2001, leaders from Virginia Mason Medical Center visited Wiremold, a manufacturing company whose Lean transformation was covered…
Today’s post is an update on the 2nd revised edition of my first book, Lean Hospitals: Improving Quality, Patient Safety, and Employee Engagement. The final edits and fully typeset book have been sent to the printer and Amazon currently shows…
Friday night’s PBS program the Nightly Business Report had a nice feature on the use of Lean at Good Samaritan Hospital in Downer’s Grove, Illinois. The video is embedded lower in this post, but you can read the transcript here:…
I will be the opening keynote speaker as part of this outstanding program, co-sponsored by the Institute of Industrial Engineers and Children’s Medical Center (of Dallas and Plano, TX). I’ll be talking about “Healthcare Kaizen,” the topic of my upcoming…
Hat tip to Dan Markovitz for pointing out this excellent post on John Toussaint’s blog: “The Key Leadership Behaviors in a Lean Organization?” The post is a letter written by Paul O’Neill answering a question from a hospital leader. Paul…
