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.
As a student of Dr. W. Edwards Deming’s books and teachings, I’m not a big fan of slogans and posters in the workplace. Last week, visting a hospital laboratory to do research for my upcoming book Healthcare Kaizen: Engaging Front-Line…
I’ve been asked many times over the past few years, mainly by physicians and other healthcare professionals, about an audiobook version of my book, Lean Hospitals: Improving Quality, Patient Safety, and Employee Engagement. My publisher has given me permission and…
As regular readers know, I’m working on a second book: Healthcare Kaizen: Engaging Front-Line Staff in Sustainable Improvements. My co-author, Joe Swartz, and I have many examples of “daily kaizen” that will be shared in the book. The idea isn’t…
I’ve posted a new video on YouTube, about 5 minutes of sections of a presentation I gave at the 2010 Shingo Prize Conference on Lean Healthcare. To have me come to your event or organization, click here for more details.…
$2.5 trillion dollars a year. 17.6% of the United States Gross Domestic Product (GDP). [source, 2009 data] These are big numbers that get thrown around a lot in the discussion of healthcare costs and healthcare reform. I stopped to think…
This has been sitting in my “to blog about” queue since March, but I wanted to catch up and post this article: “What Makes a Hospital Great” by Dr. Pauline Chen. Maybe it’s not very “lean” of me to have…
On June 30, the PBS NewsHour program did a 7-minute story on healthcare improvement (featuring Lean and Toyota methods) at Denver Health. You can also see the video or read the transcript on the NewsHour site: “Denver Hospital Sets the…
This is always a tongue-in-cheek warning, but there are times when I warn hospital leaders that they have to be careful when going to the “gemba” (gemba being a Japanese word used in Lean to describe the place where the…
Listen: Today’s episode is a discussion with Mrinalini Gadkari, a Senior Lecturer at the Fisher College of Business. Today, we’re talking about the new Master of Business Operational Excellence (MBOE) for Healthcare Program starting this fall. We’ll talk about how…
Thanks to those of you who sent me the link to this Washington Post article called “The Pain of Wrong Site Surgery.” The piece highlights how the patient safety battle has not yet been won and “some researchers and patient…
Here is a great video by Masaaki Imai, author of the classic books Kaizen: The Key To Japan’s Competitive Success and Gemba Kaizen: A Commonsense, Low-Cost Approach to Management. In the video, he emphasizes that kaizen means continuous improvement and…
Today’s episode is a chat with Jody Crane, MD, MBA and Chuck Noon, PhD. They are talking about their outstanding book The Definitive Guide to Emergency Department Operational Improvement: Employing Lean Principles with Current ED Best Practices to Create the…
