I recently saw this headline in the London Evening Standard: “Nurses struggle to ‘get the job done’ due to staff shortages and lack of time on 12 hour shifts.” The article starts with jumping to solutions (needing/wanting more staff), but…
Last year, the Institute of Medicine released its latest report titled, “Best Care at Lower Cost: The Path to Continuously Learning Health Care in America.” The report endorsed Lean as one strategy for improving the problems in our health care…
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…
While working in different environments and different industries, I’ve seen many work requirements that were deemed “non-negotiable” by management – and rightly so. For example, wearing safety glasses in a factory or wearing gloves when handling specimens in a hospital…
Yesterday’s PBS News Hour had a piece on the use of Lean and the Toyota Production System at Seattle’s Virginia Mason Medical Center:
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, with the help of Michael George, tried injecting talk of so-called “Lean Six Sigma” into the 2012 presidential race, but I think it was received as a bit of a novelty topic that illustrated the…
Here are two blog posts that my co-author, Joe Swartz, and I were very happy to see about our book Healthcare Kaizen: Engaging Front-Line Staff in Sustainable Continuous Improvements: From the Virginia Mason Medical Center Blog: “Could this new book…
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…
Here is about five minutes of video (no longer available, sadly) of Paul O’Neill (former CEO of Alcoa and former Treasury Secretary) talking about the power of Lean healthcare on CNBC. O’Neill talks about leading organizations like Virginia Mason, Intermountain,…
Thanks to the guys at Quality Digest… I was on their weekly video show “Quality Digest Live” last week, talking about “Healthcare Kaizen.” You can view the archived video here (click on the July 6 episode if that doesn’t play…
It might only be free (brief registration required) for a limited time, but there’s a great video of Dr. Kaplan (with his slides) talking about Lean and the challenges facing healthcare (content no longer available for free). In his introductory…
Virginia Mason Medical Center, a world-renowned leader in the application of Lean principles in healthcare, has a new blog: Virginia Mason Blog. They name blogs the way I do, simple and direct :-) One of their first posts highlights a…
