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.
A few weeks ago, I saw a horrific story about a retail pharmacy error in the article “Pharmacy Mistakenly Gives Pregnant Woman Abortion Pill.” Mareena Silva was mistakenly given the wrong drug by her Safeway pharmacy, which means she might…
Those of you who know my background know that I spent the first 10 years of my career working in various manufacturing sectors (including GM, Dell, and Honeywell). I moved into healthcare in 2005, part of the wave of people…
I had the most amazing morning a few weeks ago when I was in Cincinnati for the TechSolve lean healthcare event. Thanks to a friend of my sister’s, I was able to spend a few hours at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital…
I was at the annual HIMSS Conference yesterday, as a guest of the software company FormFast, giving short 10-minute talks about Lean Healthcare to audiences at their booth. It’s fair to say that it’s 10x harder to give a succinct…
This might seem like a random topic, but what the heck, it’s a Friday. I arrived in Orlando yesterday for the Society for Health Systems and HIMSS conferences and I picked up a rental gar from the garage. It’s a…
Today’s post isn’t strictly about Lean, but I was reminded by a reader to mention something really cool that I saw in Wired Magazine late last year. In the Lean methodology, we focus a lot on “visual management” of processes…
Toyota has produced a series of videos that show how their innovations, technology and otherwise, have benefitted people outside of automobiles. One video that caught my eye was their 80-second video about the use of Lean and the Toyota Production…
As you might have heard, considering all of the Super Bowl media hype from here in North Texas, our weather has been pretty bad. Between different ice storms, we’ve been “snowed in” four separate days in the last two weeks,…
Captain Sully and patient safety come together in this conversation with Naida Grunden, author of The Pittsburgh Way to Efficient Healthcare, who was corresponding with Chesley Sullenberger about aviation and healthcare safety in the months before he landed US Airways…
I really enjoyed having the chance to be in Cincinnati yesterday to participate in a Lean Healthcare workshop put on by TechSolve, a non-profit consultancy that teaches process improvement methodologies, including Lean, across multiple industries. We had well over 100…
Hat tip to my friend and fellow Productivity Press author Naida Grunden for pointing out an article she is a co-author on, “Improving Patient Care in Cardiac Surgery Using Toyota Production System Based Methodology,” published in the journal of The…
I apologize to those of you who aren’t fans of American football… but in keeping with the Super Bowl theme, I found this Vince Lombardi quote on my hotel key when I checked into a hotel (in Seattle, not Green…
