When Better Care Leads to Lower Costs: A Pharmacist-Driven Kaizen Story In healthcare, improvement initiatives often get derailed when they start with one primary question: “How can we cut costs?” That doesn’t engage people. But what if we turned that…
tl;dr: In this post, Mark delves into the detrimental effects of a punitive culture within healthcare, arguing for a shift towards a culture of helping. Citing examples and personal insights, he examines how a compassionate, collaborative environment can enhance patient…
I’ve held many roles in my pharmacy career that has spanned seventeen years now. I’ve been in formal leadership roles for more than fifteen years out of those seventeen. I’ve worked in many places, doing many different types of work in…
This is from the 3rd edition of my book Lean Hospitals. I’ve copied and pasted from the book with no additional edits, although I’ll bold italic some parts for emphasis. I’ll some closing thoughts at the end. For a more complete PDF…
I'm overdue in writing more about my last trip to Japan a few months back.
Today, I'll like to share some highlights from one organization we visited, Seki Chuo Hospital, which is located outside of Nagoya. I have visited this hospital in 2012 and 2014 and it's interesting to see how their approach to Total Quality Management (TQM), Lean, and Kaizen has progressed and evolved. I mentioned them in a 2014 post about "quality circles."
A few of you sent me this article... and you were correct to think I would be interested: "Inside Alabama's Auto Jobs Boom: Cheap Wages, Little Training, Crushed Limbs." What are the parallels and lessons for hospitals?
There’s been a back-and-forth of views about the state of pediatric emergency medicine recently in the Wall Street Journal. Let me start first, actually, with the more recent statement, a rebuttal from Michael Gerardi M.D., FACEP, President of the American College of Emergency…
Here’s another video in the series that Joe Swartz and I shot at Franciscan St. Francis Health back in October. See them all here or via a YouTube playlist. You might remember pharmacy manager (now director) Ronda Freije from two previous videos. Here,…
A few weeks back, I posted the first new video from my Healthcare Kaizen co-author‘s health system: “Endoscopy Nurses are “Kaizen Crazy” at Franciscan St. Francis Health!” Today’s post includes the second video and, as I add new ones, you can…
Tomorrow, I’m leaving for Japan and I’ll be with Kaizen Institute for our second Lean healthcare study tour (see a PDF about the trip). We have an incredibly diverse group, with attendees from the U.S., Canada, Denmark, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Malaysia,…
I wrote about Kaizen the other day on LinkedIn and the first comment was from Dr. Leke Agbejule, BPharm, MSc, PharmD, from South Florida: Very well said. As a Lean Six Sigma practitioner I live & consult by the “Kaizen” philosophy. I like…
In case you missed it, see Saturday’s post: “Why Toyota is Eliminating the Andon Cord from its Factories.” As I occasionally do, today’s post is one where I’m going to close out some open browser tabs and post links to…
