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 common theme I’ve written about from the start of my blogging days is the Lean/Toyota notion that price is dictated by the market (the customers) — price is NOT something you can set in isolation based on your costs.…
Last week, I published Part 1 of my notes about a breakfast talk by Dr. Brent James at the Shingo Prize Conference. One of the more interesting things that Dr. James said was something he prefaced as saying it would…
A few weeks back, I was given the chance to preview a Lean Healthcare intro video from a Wisconsin firm called Optima. The video is part of their Lean Healthcare Video Series, called Lean: A Prescription for Healthcare. The video…
At last week’s Shingo Prize conference, I was very excited to meet Dr. Stephen Covey (my podcast is here), but I was just as excited, if not more so, to meet Dr. Brent James, the noted healthcare quality expert from…
I recently heard this on a cable news channel that was blaring in the airport: “The current passport processing time is 3 to 6 weeks”. Well, that’s not right from a Lean perspective. In this post, I’ll talk about breaking…
Paul Levy has shared some photos and a video, from Boston’s Beth Israel Deaconness Medical Center, that gives a glimpse into the design of their new pharmacy. He wrote, in part: We have an old pharmacy on one side of…
The general public still, generally speaking, doesn’t realize how much preventable harm and death occurs in healthcare each year. Efforts like the Dennis Quaid “Target Zero” TV program are trying to educate the public about how common medical harm is…
Here’s yet another article with the lazy “Lean and Mean” cliche’ in the headline: “Make Your Physician Practice a Lean, Mean Healing Machine.” Real Lean isn’t mean toward patients or staff or physicians. It’s a shame the headline had to…
The idea of “surgical robots” is an interesting one. As a Lean guy, I’m naturally somewhat skeptical of technology – not to be a Luddite, but GM was the company that wanted the high-tech lights-out robotic factory (a vision that…
I heard a great line from an Emergency Department doc and physician leader yesterday. Talking about his hospital’s Lean efforts, he said, simply: “Data should create light, not heat.” Brilliant. Simply brilliant. What he meant was that data should be…
Interesting news from Idaho, where an outside Lean consultant has been named interim CEO of St. Luke’s Magic Valley Medical Center (see “Consultant to fill in as T.F. hospital CEO“). From the article: Mike Reno, a consultant helping St. Luke’s…
I was able to have a chat with Eric Ries yesterday as we were recording some video of him answering some follow up questions from the LEI webinar he did for us last week on Lean Startups (that will be…
