Hoarders and Stashers? Ask Why…
Short post today, but a simple message, I think. One of the best lessons I’ve learned about Lean management is about the need to ask “why?” Don’t assume, don’t blame – ask why. It’s a very common situation in a…
Tag Healthcare
Healthcare Improvement Through Lean, Leadership, and Learning
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.
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Don’t Let Benchmarking Replace Your Own Process Engineering
Through the @LEIhealthcare twitter account, one source of autotweets are the new threads started in the Lean Enterprise Institute forums. One new thread was started last week, titled “Sitter Ratios,” that caught my eye. Unfortunately, many of the Lean web…
Tampa Bay Business Journal Features Lean at Moffitt Cancer Center
The full article requires a subscription, but John Toussaint and I were each quoted in this article from last Friday: “Toyota techniques drive profit, efficiency gains at Moffitt.” As with many of these articles, the full story tells a picture…
Interview with Masaaki Imai on Taiichi Ohno and Respect for People
TL;DR (2026): This interview with Masaaki Imai still matters because it captures an early, unvarnished view of how “respect for people” was practiced–not idealized–by Taiichi Ohno and Toyota. It reminds today’s Lean leaders that respect doesn’t mean being soft or…
Let’s Sign Documents Promising Not to Make Errors?
You might remember me blogging about the Indianapolis incident where three babies died after being mistakenly given an adult dose of heparin back in 2007. The same set of failure modes led to a non-fatal overdose of actor Dennis Quaid’s…
Why Nurses Should Reject “LAME” and Demand Lean
There’s a long-standing argument that I’ve been dragged into with a group that calls itself “new systems thinkers.” They loudly criticize Lean as being altogether awful (with the alternative, predictably, being their services). One of them wrote a blog post…
$500k in Stimulus Money for Lean Healthcare Training – Then What?
This headline jumped out at me: “Local hospital receives $500,000 to train workers.” What also jumped out at me, in the article, is that the money comes from the federal American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (commonly referred to as the…
A Brief Video Look into Lean at VIBCO
I may have shared this video before, but it’s worth taking a quick video peek into one of my favorite companies – VIBCO. When I was living in Boston, I had the pleasure of visiting the gemba a few times…
Collected Quality and Patient Safety Improvement Statistics – #Lean Healthcare
I’m going to use this blog post / page to collect published statistics about the impact the Lean management philosophy has had on healthcare quality and patient safety. I will update this over time and this page can be accessed…
Avoid Charting Performance Measures in Confusing or Misleading Ways
Last month, I wrote a post titled “Consulting Case Studies Need Statistical Validity” where I discussed the need to show more than simple “before and after” numbers in case studies. I promised some follow up posts on his topic, so…
Don’t Speed Up or Improve a Workaround Process – Fix the System
Hospitals are full of workarounds and fire fighting, it’s a pretty common problem. That’s one reason cost is so high and quality is often so poor. One of the key insights that comes from introducing healthcare professionals to Lean concepts,…
Podcast #102 – Ron Wince, CEO of Guidon Performance Solutions – Lean Healthcare
My guest for Episode #102 is Ron Wince, the President/CEO of Guidon Performance Solutions. We talk here about his views on lean healthcare and the impact of healthcare reform on the healthcare landscape. Prior to founding Guidon, Ron held senior…
