I often get asked, “How did you get into healthcare?” I was working on a chapter for a Lean healthcare compilation book that’s being published in Holland and I wrote the following material that wasn’t the right fit for that…
Monday is Labor Day, a holiday here in the United States. Some nursing unions support Lean in healthcare, while others are in opposition. My stance is been that the unions should love Lean (since it improves the workplace for their members),…
I saw this piece by Bob Herman at Becker’s Hospital Review and ended up writing a blog post here instead of writing a long comment there. The piece is: 10 Ideas That Hospital and Health System CEOs Need to Ditch…
Today is the first day of the 5th annual Lean Healthcare Transformation Summit. Follow along on Twitter with hashtag #HCSummit14 to see my tweets and thoughts from others. I will be adding updates to this post during the day, as well. These are not…
It’s often said that Lean is about “doing more with less.” Historically, and practically speaking, it’s true. But, it’s a phrase that we should be careful about for a number of reasons. Looking back at the origins of the term…
Thanks to a Google News Alert email, I get news stories (on a daily basis) about hospital layoffs around the country. Many of the articles feature an executive making a reassuring sounding comment along the lines of: “Although we have…
Like yesterday’s “live blog” post about the Autoliv talk, I also wrote this post as Art Byrne talked, but held it for publication today. He is author of the book The Lean Turnaround: How Business Leaders Use Lean Principles to…
I was fortunate to have three interviews published in the past week, where I was talking about Lean Healthcare and Kaizen, so I thought I’d share them here. Cutting Waste is More Important Than Ever: An Interview with Lean Healthcare…
While Lean is not primarily a cost-cutting methodology (or, we could say it’s not focused ONLY on costs), cost reduction is a common end result of improving safety, quality, flow, and other factors. Since 60 to 70% of a hospital’s…
Mark’s note: Here’s another great vacation guest post by Jeff Hajek: By Jeff Hajek Despite having been fairly main stream for going on three decades now, there are a surprising number of misconceptions about Lean. Here is a list of…
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…
Ontario’s Peterborough Regional Medical Centre is about 18 months into their Lean transformation. They are being featured in a series of four articles in their local newspaper, the first two of which are already out. Article one: LEAN machine at…
