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.
I first blogged about the possibility in March – doing a weeklong study trip to Japan with Lean Healthcare professionals, in partnership with Kaizen Institute. The dates are set for November 11 to 17 and we have people signed up…
A number of readers have sent me a link to the latest New Yorker missive from Dr. Atul Gawande (whose work I greatly admire). It’s titled “Big Med: Restaurant chains have managed to combine quality control, cost control, and innovation.…
Hat tip to Mike S. for pointing out this HBR article “Why “I’m Sorry” Doesn’t Always Translate.” The piece talks about the differences in cultural norms about apologies in countries ranging from Japan, China, India, and the United States. I’m…
TL;DR: Long before Lean and Kaizen became common language in healthcare, Don Berwick argued in a 1989 New England Journal of Medicine article that improvement requires leaders to stop blaming “bad apples” and start fixing systems. His message–replace fear with…
One thing I have enjoyed in the past few years is meeting and working with more people with direct experience working at Toyota (including here in San Antonio, my new home). There are always gems and brilliant nuggets that come…
Hat tip to my dad who saw this commercial on TV back home in Detroit. It’s an ad from the Henry Ford Health System, trumpeting their improvements in reducing errors and infections. They say if hospitals around the world adopted…
My guest for episode #154 is Rick Morrow, a director at Healthcare Performance Partners and author of the book Utilizing the 3Ms of Process Improvement in Healthcare: A Roadmap to High Reliability Using Lean, Six Sigma, and Change Leadership, from…
I’ve been to Saskatoon, Saskatchewan before — in February. It was a very cold, snowy place, to say the least! But, there are many warm, caring people who are using Lean management to improve the hospital working environment and patient…
MD Anderson Cancer Center shares a lot of great material online and at conferences. here is an audio presentation (with slides) by Doris Quinn, PhD, Director, Process Improvement and Quality Education titled: W. Edwards Deming: The Man and the Message.…
Thanks to Healthcare Finance News for interviewing me for this piece they ran this week: “7 ways lean healthcare management reduces cost.” As I think the piece conveys, cost reduction comes as a result mainly from methods that are different…
Preventable medical mistakes remain one of the most serious challenges in healthcare, yet many hospitals still struggle with learning from medical errors and preventing them from happening again. From emergency departments to pathology labs, the same types of errors continue…
In the “Lean Startup” parlance, our startup KaiNexus is not going into an existing market – we are working to develop a new market (for improvement management software). We have competitors – but they tend to be Excel, SharePoint, and…