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.
The long history of Industrial Engineers helping in healthcare goes back 100 years to one of the “fathers of Industrial Engineering,” Frank Gilbreth — and his wife, Lillian! It was Gilbreth who noticed that surgeons spent more time searching for…
Unfortunately, healthcare professionals often aren’t given the tools they need to do their jobs properly. People are forced into workarounds and corner cutting, or they are forced into wasting time by running around to find equipment — or working equipment.…
I was going through some old notes I’ve taken when visiting different hospitals and I came up with this quote from a healthcare professional: “I’ve never worked in a place where managers asked ‘how can I help you?’” The good…
I saw the following in a submission for a session at the 2012 Society for Health Systems conference, where I’m the Lean track chair. One submission said the following: “Lean efforts often succeed but do not always provide meaningful benefits”…
When I recently interviewed Paul O’Neill and Dr. Richard Shannon about the amazing improvements in patient safety that had been made in the Pittsburgh Regional Health Initiative organizations, they each seemed a bit frustrated that these simple, yet effective, methods…
I’ve recently had an email exchange with a retiree who is volunteering in a non-profit hospice care facility. I’m sharing this thoughts with his permission. It sounds like there’s often nothing for the volunteers to do and the leaders aren’t…
After last week’s piece on “putting the continuous back into continuous improvement,” I had another article published this past week. This new article was published in the publication “Hospitals & Health Networks,” co-authored with Rob Harding, and it’s called “Cut…
Dr. Richard Shannon shares how Lean and Toyota-inspired methods dramatically reduced hospital-acquired infections at Allegheny General and the University of Pennsylvania. This episode explores leadership, standardized work, and why disciplined problem solving saves lives and reduces costs. Podcast #127 is…
In my segment, we talk about Lean in healthcare, including my recent article on Healthcare Kaizen, quality and patient safety improvement, unique challenges in healthcare, and more.
I’m in beautiful Traverse City, Michigan for a few days for the Michigan Lean Consortium annual conference. It’s my home state, so it’s great to see the collaboration around lean healthcare and lean, more generally. Michigan, along with other industrial…
Thanks to Quality Digest for publishing an article I co-authored with Gregory Jacobson, MD, a co-founder and the CEO of KaiNexus, a software startup I am working with as we go to market with web-based technology that helps initiate, manage,…
On his blog, John Toussaint shared this letter from ThedaCare CEO Dean Gruner to all employees. Toussaint said the letter is inspired by Paul O’Neill and his thoughts on patient safety (you can hear my podcast with O’Neill here, as…
