Here is the question that is being presented in this article: Is lean healthcare improving the patients experience? The benefits attained by applying lean principles into the healthcare system are becoming well known. The evidence speaks for itself as more and more healthcare facilities are training their staff to understand and apply lean principles.
I found this article about the Saskatchewan Ministry of Health and how they are making dramatic improvements in the delivery of patient care. I am proud when I read this article because I was one of the lean consultants that delivered the lean training to the medical staff in several hospitals throughout Saskatchewan.
Lean Healthcare Improving The Patient’s Experience
Lean Healthcare Transformation
Saskatchewan’s Ministry of Health is in the midst of an ambitious plan to alter the way it strategizes and delivers health care across the province.
If it is successful, the province will be the first in Canada to introduce the so-called “Lean” system of management to all of its 43,000-plus health care workers and managers.
Dan Florizone, deputy minister of health, calls the approach a “game changer” and says Lean has the potential to “turn the system on its head.” He says the 50-year project will include everyone from the nurse practitioner in a remote northern clinic to dozenmember teams in big-city operating rooms.
“This is transformational,” Florizone said. “No state or province that I’m aware of in the world has attempted it on this scale.”
In 2008, Florizone was recruited to the ministry from his post as CEO of the Five Hills Health Region in Moose Jaw, largely to lead the introduction of Lean across the provincial health system.
He’d already been doing just that in Five Hills, which acted as a test site for the province’s early dabbling in the philosophy. Pilot projects in that region reduced injuries and eliminated a backlog of jobs for maintenance workers, squeezed in more colonoscopies without increasing spending and juggled supply carts to cut down time professionals spent doing inventory counts.
A last-minute redesign of the Moose Jaw Union Hospital’s ER has also paid off. In a recent Health Quality Council survey of emergency room patients, respondents gave that hospital some of the best ratings in the province for waiting times and quality of care from health care workers.
Pioneered by Toyota, Lean methods have since been embraced by players in the manufacturing and service sectors.
The cru To look at a product or service from a customer’s perspective and identify waste, or aspects a customer wouldn’t pay for by choice. Defective products, waiting or walking back and forth to see different health care workers have no value in the eyes of consumers.
Eliminating waste every time a step is repeated can add up to significant gains, according to the philosophy. And, the ideas about what constitutes waste have to come from the front lines – in this case, health care workers, patients and their families.
Florizone admits he was skeptical until he participated in a workshop at Seattle’s Virginia Mason Medical Centre in 2004.
“It’s going to take a hell of a lot of leadership to be able to convince people this isn’t a fad,” Florizone said. “There’s only one way to convince the skeptic and that’s the way I was convinced – let’s do it.”
It is a mistake to think health care is so different from other industries that it can’t use the same solutions manufacturers have already found to similar problems, Florizone says.
“The old way of cost-cutting was absolutely wrongheaded,” he said. “I realized for the first time why we were so mistaken in the ’80s and ’90s when we were cutting budgets and ending up with poor service at the end of the day.”
Deciding what to tackle is another key component of Lean. Florizone says an organization needs to pick just a couple of top priorities and focus intensely on them before moving on to the rest of its wish list. “If everything’s a priority, nothing’s a priority.”
The government has organized Lean’s provincial rollout into two phases.
The planning phase is called Hoshin Kanri in the original Japanese term. The government is calling it “strategy deployment.”
It differs like this from current strategic planning: High-level executives run their proposed priorities before teams of lower-level managers and front-line workers, then consider their feedback before proceeding.
Phase 2 will take several years and involves building up local expertise and getting more than 43,000 workers in the province’s health regions, Saskatchewan Cancer Agency, Health Quality Council and Health Ministry thinking like a synchronized Lean machine: Identify waste, test a possible fix, evaluate the outcome and repeat. The cycle can, and should, go on forever. View the original article.
This article is a testament to the hard work of the people involved in this healthcare improvement project. Not all people start off as a believer or convinced that a new process will work. However, the Saskatchewan Ministry of Health has proven that they can deliver believable results . They have clearly answered the core question that many people ask: Is lean healthcare improving the patient’s experience? The answer is “Yes, it is.”
Healthcare waiting times and costs are being reduced. Hospitals systems are becoming patient centric, which makes them more “patient friendly.” Lean principles are giving medical staff the ability to learn how to “work smarter,” which beats “working harder.”
