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.
Mark’s Note: Today’s guest post is from a great friend of mine and this blog, Dean Bliss, of the Iowa Healthcare Collaborative. Check out my podcast with him. By Dean Bliss As someone who’s been doing Lean in healthcare for…
Today’s guest post is by Duke Rohe, a Quality Improvement Education Consultant at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas. I know Duke from his heavy involvement with the Society for Health Systems. Kaizen’s Test for the Best Idea…
Mark’s note: Today’s guest post is by Dr. Mark Jaben, an emergency medicine physician who has also been working with KaiNexus. If you drive along Highway 19 near Fayetteville, West Virginia, you’re likely to drive across the bridge traversing…
Mark’s note: Ankit Patel is a returning guest blogger and a good friend in the world of Lean and Lean Healthcare. Check out his blog and website. By Ankit Patel: In all my years of practicing lean/process improvement I’ve…
Mark’s note: Today’s guest post is by Brian Buck, a fellow lean healthcare practitioner who regularly blogs at “Improve With Me.” Following my tendency to share the silly and the funny on Saturdays, Brian delivers some laughs and insights below.…
Former Wiremold CEO Art Byrne explains why Lean must be led directly by the CEO and treated as a core business strategy–not a set of tools. Drawing on his experience at GE, Danaher, and The Wiremold Company, Byrne shares how…
Yesterday was an outstanding day at the Northeast Shingo Prize Conference in Worcester, Massachusetts – my first time attending and speaking at this event. It’s always great to see Bruce Hamilton (of “Toast Kaizen” fame) and the rest of the…
The list of stuff I’ve read and wanted to blog about has grown… that inventory becomes this post. Here are links to some varied articles I’ve read recently that might be of interest on a number of Lean related topics,…
Thanks go to Hakan Forss, from Sweden, who sent me a link to an article he wrote about Lean, waste, and patient flow. He compares two healthcare systems–one that focuses on keeping silo-ed resources busy (which leads to long patient…
Recently, the Wall Street Journal put some focus on the issue of so-called “door to balloon” times in our hospitals. “Door to balloon” is a measure of time from a patient with a serious type of heart attack (“STEMI“) arriving…
As I worked on co-authoring Healthcare Kaizen, I dove deeper into my study of “kaizen” practices and mindsets, revisiting many core books on kaizen after years of practice in different industries. I used to define kaizen as the phrase it’s…
Almost two years ago, I wrote an article for FierceHealthcare.com called “How lean management helped hospitals avoid layoffs.” Here in 2012, I see headlines daily about a hospital somewhere in the U.S. who is “forced” to lay off staff (or…