InfoQ Homepage Presentations How Lean Thinking Helps Hospitals
How Lean Thinking Helps Hospitals
01:04:23
Summary
Mark Graban overviews the Lean methodology applied in healthcare using examples and lessons learned from leading hospitals around the world.
Bio
Mark Graban is an internationally-recognized expert in the field of "Lean Healthcare," as a consultant, author, keynote speaker, and blogger. In June 2011, Mark joined the software company KaiNexus as their "Chief Improvement Officer," to help further their mission of "making improvement easier" in healthcare organizations, while continuing his other consulting and speaking activities.
About the conference
SDEC is an annual conference hosted by Protegra where industry professionals share their own real-world experiences gained through delivering solutions.
Dec 15, 2013
Community comments
examples show the way
by Balázs Hadházi-Borsos,
examples show the way
by Balázs Hadházi-Borsos,
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Hi
I really liked your presentation describing several examples about improving healthcare processes. I was actually looking for two more keywords: continuous improvement and value delivery. According to my experience, lean is more likely related to processes than to institutes. A process is about delivering a value -> it can be lean from different points of view. Continuous improvement is about identifying more and more values in institute and additionally more and more ways to deliver a higher value. During this improvement some already lean processes have to be redesigned completely. That's normal. Sometimes a new goal is more important than an old value.
You mentioned it is important to have happy employees. That's right. They will be happy if they feel themselves important. Employees have to know exactly what kind of value delivery process they are participating in and what kind of value they are delivering. This is leaders' duty: they are motivating people by revealing different ways of delivering value. Managers' role is different: they should help employees to achieve a goal.
In healthcare the focus is on patients. For an ill patient the biggest value is to get healthy. This is the primary value and the institute should focus on delivering this value. By the way while the patient is under treatment usually additional values appear: how fast and expensive the treatment is, how much the patient is waiting for a doctor or for a nurse, the quality of the food, ...
Lean helps the hospitals by identifying the different value delivery processes and by showing ways how they can be improved. Unfortunately there is no general rule how a process can be improved. The improvement has to be adjusted to that process in that institute. That's why I think your presentation was really good because you presented problems and solutions. Thanks.
Kind regards
Balázs Hadházi-Borsos