Tag: Healthcare

Today's post points to my guest blog post for the W. Edwards Deming Institute: Reflections on Dr. Deming's Hospital Notes - What Has Changed Since 1990? Why do the same problems that Dr. Deming experienced as a patient 30 years ago still happen so often today?

My guest for Episode #274 of the podcast is Jay Arthur, author of Lean Six Sigma for Hospitals: Improving Patient Safety, Patient Flow and the Bottom Line, Second Edition. To me, "Lean Sigma" is often a controversial topic... not because anything is wrong with Six Sigma…

Are there parallels between medicine and organizations when we look at the tension between heroism and the sometimes boring work of preventing problems and improving things? I comment on an article by Dr. Atul Gawande…

Lean sometimes gets, I think, an unfair rap that it’s only a method for incremental improvement. See this article, for example: “Limits of Lean — Transformative Care Redesign Must Go Beyond Typical Lean-Based Improvements.”

I saw this article a few days ago in one of the larger healthcare industry trade publications: How One Woman Saved IU Health $54 Million The headline is misleading, as addressed in the opening sentence / sub-headline of the story (via HealthLeaders): “With a little help from about 10,000 of her friends and colleagues, the head

Since the first Lean Healthcare Transformation Summit was held in 2010, I’ve been fortunate to attend and participate each year. I think it’s the pre-eminent Lean healthcare event of the year...

When I talk to organizations about Kaizen, or continuous improvement, there's far too much self-defeating talk, where people say things like: "We're not going to try this Kaizen process because our culture isn't ready yet."

My guest for Episode #272 is Steve Thompson, Director of Patient Driven Supply Network initiatives for Cardinal Health, a global, integrated healthcare services and products company....

Joining me for Episode #271 is Isaac Mitchell (@IsaacMitchell), talking about Lean Design for healthcare, the Society for Health Systems, and more. Isaac is a...

Hear Mark read the post (subscribe to the podcast series): I don't normally pay too much attention to TV commercials, but I was working out...

My guests for Episode #270 of the podcast are two physicians: Paul DeChant, MD and Diane Shannon, MD. They are co-authors of the recently-released book Preventing Physician Burnout: Curing the Chaos and Returning Joy to the Practice of Medicine.

I had a chance to visit one of their community hospitals, Hillcrest Hospital, as well as the main campus. It was a very stimulating visit and it was great to see the progress they were making in building a “culture of improvement.”