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.
Device Alerts Doctors To Items Left Behind After Surgery – Indiana News Story – WRTV Indianapolis Healthcare is often stuck in the mindset that’s considered outdated in lean manufacturing settings — the old idea that better quality must inherently cost…
Dennis Quaid Takes Oprah To Hospital That OD’d His Babies This might be the first time I’m DVR-ing the Oprah show. Tomorrow, actor Dennis Quaid will talk about the medical errors that nearly killed his twin babies. For the first…
Ah, summits. I once watched Coach Pat Summitt’s Tennessee Lady Volunteers take a 35 to 2 lead against my Northwestern Wildcats in the first few minutes of an NCAA basketball tournament game. That was too big of a deficit to…
Training Within Healthcare (TWI Newsletter) – PDF File It’s been a busy week, helping spread the word about Lean healthcare in Puerto Rico, something I’ll be able to blog about soon. So, I’ll be lazy and post an article I…
Hello from Connecticut…. it’s always fascinating to me to see the spread of Lean healthcare around the world. When I attended the Lean Enterprise Institute global summit on Lean Healthcare in the UK in 2007, they had attendees from 20…
Once again, our guest for Episode #62 is John S. Toussaint, MD, the CEO emeritus of ThedaCare, and CEO of the ThedaCare Center for Healthcare Value. Dr. Toussaint is very well known for his leadership of the Lean efforts in…
TL;DR: Toyota stands apart because every employee is empowered to improve their work every day. That combination of respect for people, daily improvement, and visible learning creates better quality, safety, and performance–and it works just as well in healthcare as…
Amid nurse shortage, hospitals focus on retention I’ve heard a similar theme before — the problem isn’t that we need to graduate more nurses, we need to just quit losing so many from the field. Newly minted nurse Katie O’Bryan…
Hand washing and proper hand hygiene is a big concern at most hospitals — thankfully so, since hand hygiene and other basic infection control measures can save lives, preventing or slowing the spread of harmful bugs like MRSA and C-Diff,…
I was interviewed recently by Quality Digest about my book, Lean Hospitals: Improving Quality, Patient Safety, and Employee Satisfaction (first edition). The video appears on their webpage, www.qualitydigest.com or you can click here to play it on their website.
I get sort of tired of seeing questions like this on the internet (on the Yahoo Group for Healthcare Management Engineers): Just wondering if anyone has placed computers in each patient room? What layout has worked the best? One that…
Part of the MoveToHealthcare.com series: Here is an updated and better maintained list…. Lean Healthcare Blogs (or those that cover Lean quite often): Lean Blog (link healthcare posts only) Daily Kaizen (Group Health Cooperative) Lean Healthcare Exchange Steven J. Spear…