I’ve been intrigued by the “Lean Startup” movement since I first saw Eric Ries speak at MIT back in late 2009. I’ve read his book The Lean Startup, have attended a bunch of the conferences (speaking at two of them –…
As I sometimes do, I’m going to close out a bunch of browser tabs (which makes my Mac run faster) and I’ll do that by sharing some articles that caught my eye but maybe don’t merit full blog posts of…
Here’s an article that summarizes the pocket of Lean healthcare activity in and around Winona and LaCrosse, Minnesota: “Waste reduction: Area health systems embrace lean practice“ One hospital mentioned is Winona Health. You can listen to my earlier podcast with…
It’s easy for people to think that Lean is about cost-cutting. That would be wrong, but many people associate Lean with cost cutting. Cost cutting is the old mindset. The old hack-and-slash approach, which focuses on layoffs or “everybody cut…
What Henry Ford wrote about hospitals in 1922 sounds surprisingly modern. He argued for reducing nurses’ wasted motion, designing around patients, standardizing rooms, challenging professional hierarchy, and treating every process as experimental. More than a century later, many of those…
After some supporters of the Saskatchewan Lean healthcare efforts reached out to me, I’ve been trying to follow everything that’s being said and written – which is hard to do (just try a Google news search). There are many facets to…
A few weeks back, USA Today published an article that made me think of some of the approaches being used by hospitals under the banner of “Lean Design.” In Lean Design efforts (see this great book), hospitals involve customers (patients…
A new tower opened at Seattle Children’s Hospital two days ago, built with “Lean Design” principles and methods, as this story describes: Hospital design started with yarn, cardboard and duct tape. They call their approach IFD, or Integrated Facility Design.…
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…
Mark’s note: Here is a guest post by my good friend Naida Grunden, author of two great books on Lean Healthcare. America’s 5000 hospitals face a perfect storm: aging facilities that need renovation, replacement, or seismic retrofit versus a vastly…
Last week, the New York Times published a piece called “Don’t Just Talk About Change. Show It,” written by Mick Wilz, an employee at Sur-Seal, a family-owned business in Cincinnati. As part of a Lean initiative (as evidenced by their…
Here is a nice story that’s been in my blog’s “to write about” inventory since late October: “Participation in Lean events has renewed my faith in health care.” The piece is written by Heather Thiessen and she was able to…
