ThedaCare has long been regarded as one of the most influential examples of Lean thinking in healthcare. These posts explore what ThedaCare’s journey actually teaches leaders—about management systems, executive commitment, strategy deployment, culture change, and the fragility of improvement when leadership changes.
Rather than treating Lean as a set of tools or success stories frozen in time, this archive examines real lessons, missteps, evolution, and leadership reflections from ThedaCare and others who have studied or worked with the organization.
Womack and Jones video on spread – Blog – ThedaCare Center for Healthcare Value From John Toussaint’s blog, this video starts with a question about (I’m paraphrasing) how do you balance continuous innovation (in how “Lean” works in a hospital)…
Six Best Practice Elements of ThedaCare’s Collaborative Care Model Here’s an article from Becker’s Hospital Review about the six best practices of Lean-based Collaborative Care at Thedacare. This is the same model that was featured a few months back on…
Patrick Hagan: Waste Not, Want Not: The Key to Reducing Costs – washingtonpost.com Here is an outstanding piece from the President & Chief Operating Officer of Seattle Children’s Hospital, Pat Hagan. Coincidentally, I just recorded a podcast today with Joan…
Our friends at ThedaCare are running an experiment this week. One of their Rapid Improvement Event team members is going to send a few Twitter updates about the process for their event. In healthcare “R.I.E.” is a commonly used term…
Healthcare – “Writing The New Playbook For U.S. Health Care: Lessons From Wisconsin” John Toussaint just had a piece published in the influential peer-reviewed journal “Health Affairs.” You normally have to pay for the article, but the Lean Enterprise Institute…
Hospital CEOs manage staff time, inventory to cut costs – USATODAY.com It’s nice to see a major publication covering Lean and, especially, Lean in healthcare. This time, it was USA Today who, again, did a better job than the WSJ…
This is an old story, from May, that I’ve meant to write about for a while. Peter Orszag, the Director of the Office of Management Budget wrote a piece in the WSJ about healthcare. He wrote: The good news is…
Here are all of the videos, embedded from Fox News. Click here for a page with summaries of each. As of October 2011, you can view the videos on the Fox News website. What is ThedaCare? Paid Less…
This is a big day for Lean in healthcare, as here is a link to FoxNews.com with five longer videos about ThedaCare and their quality and cost improvement efforts (and results). I thought last night’s story (transcript) that aired on…
Tune in TONIGHT, Friday August 21, 10 PM on Fox News Channel. See my blog post about the links to online video at FoxNews.com. The “On the Record” show with Greta Van Susteren visited Appleton, Wisconsin and ThedaCare, one of…
Our returning guest is John S. Toussaint, MD, the CEO emeritus of ThedaCare, and CEO of the ThedaCare Center for Healthcare Value. In the interest of disclosure, he is a partner in our Lean Enterprise Institute efforts to promote Lean…
As I had alluded to the other day, there was a huge investigative piece that ran across the country Sunday in the Hearst Newspapers. The main URL for the series is www.DeadByMistake.com. You can read all of the articles at…
