Here is a commentary that was written by Gary S. Kaplan, MD, the CEO of Virginia Mason Medical Center: “The Lean Approach to Health Care: Safety, Quality, and Cost.” More than a decade ago, Kaplan and the team at VMMC…
Listen A returning guest for episode #159 is John Toussaint, MD, the CEO of the ThedaCare Center for Healthcare Value and the author of the books On the Mend: Revolutionizing Healthcare to Save Lives and Transform the Industry and Potent…
Mark’s note: Today kicks off my vacation and a stretch of guest posts that will run in this spot through October 12 (with the exception of a new podcast with Art Byrne that will appear later today or tomorrow). After…
I didn’t have a post yesterday because it was the Labor Day holiday here in the U.S. While I’m not a “worker,” in the sense of an hourly employee or union worker anymore, I still enjoyed the day off with…
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…
Did you hear about the fireworks mishap in San Diego on the 4th? Instead of a planned 20-minute show, there was a “glitch” that led to ALL of the fireworks being set off in a 15-second explosion-azanga. I don’t know…
I went through our new book Healthcare Kaizen to categorize the different improvement examples in the book… We have, by my count, 124 examples from hospitals and healthcare organizations around the world., not including the fun examples from Chapter 12…
After a week of serious topics and sometimes pointed discussion, let’s end with a funny sign… well wait, there’s a serious story behind this sign too. This is a sign from a New Zealand hospital, sent via email by a…
When I was leaving the recent Shingo Prize conference, last week, I had what can only be described as a taxi ride from hell on my way from Covington, Kentucky to the CVG airport. The taxi driver, who had been…
Lean is not a “command and control” leadership and management model. The old command-and-control dynamic leads to so much poor quality and misery in all sorts of industries and organizations – including factories and hospitals. In a command and control…
Episode #113 is a discussion with Aubrey Daniels, PhD, the founder and chairman of his firm Aubrey Daniels International. Today, we are talking about his most recent book titled Safe By Accident?, a book I really enjoyed. So I was…
I’m really excited that I’m going to be attending tomorrow’s Northwestern football game that’s being played at Wrigley Field, the legendary baseball stadium that opened in 1912. This will be the first college game played there since 1938 and the…
