Lean Methodology In Health Care: A Case Study

In healthcare, throughput refers to the ED process that impacts patient flow (Jarousse 2011). Process and flow began to be scrutinized for opportunities to improve the overcrowding by becoming more efficient. Due to this new process focus, throughput was born. This is also the point where lean flow or lean thinking became prevalent into healthcare from a manufacturing stand point to improve throughput. Lean principles revolve around removing non value added steps and standardizing work flow and processes. When applied aggressively hospital wide, lean principles can have a dramatic effect on productivity, cost, and quality. Numerous books concerning lean healthcare have been published in recent years (Crane & Noon 2011).

In order to eliminate the inefficiencies witnessed in many public and private hospitals that serve a number of patients, an integrated approach to handling the daily workload is necessary. There is need for all departments within the hospital to work closely together in ensuring more effective and efficient service deliveries. In this paper, a planned change is going to be carried out involving designing a new system that incorporates all the departments within the hospital. This includes the surgery department, pediatrics department, dentistry department, nursing department, pharmacy departments, laboratory and testing department, X-ray and Physiotherapy departments, Equipment maintenance and Engineering department, Information Technology

The reasoning to Intermountain Health Care’s approach to the management of health services can be related back to a ‘crazy’ idea James was introduced to in a Lecture he attended conducted by Dr. W. Edwards Deming. This idea argues that higher quality could lead to lower cost. As we identified previously, IHCs business goals relate to the optimization of processes and services in order to minimize the quality of waste in terms of cost. This sort of business model will produce a high quality business, reflecting optimisation of processes and resources which will aid positive services to patients - whilst maintaining the financial stability of the business in the most effective way possible.

Training Topic: The training topic purposed is, leader standard work, which is a lean tool that helps leaders to identify what is value-add and non-value-add in their work. Once a leader can identify what is non-value add, they begin to reduce the time spent completing these tasks and spend more time coaching their employees to problem solve and improve patient care. In lean value is determined by what the customer is willing to pay for. Consequently, in healthcare, the customer is the patient. Users of this tool do not have to be formal leaders within the organization, but the intent is to enable individuals to manage their daily, weekly, bi-weekly, and monthly activities strategically and to eliminate the the non-value add activities.

American Society of Health-System Pharmacists says that the pharmacist’s responsibility is appropriate, accurate, and timely distribution of medications to patients. To better meet these responsibilities, distribution systems were developed to enable pharmacy staff to review medication orders and to supervise the preparation and filling or selection of medication dosage, as well as the delivery of the medication to patient care units. Automated dispensing systems have advanced to facilitate fulfillment of pharmacists’ distributive responsibilities, increase distribution-system capabilities, and improve efficiencies. The purpose of this paper is to show the benefits and the challenges of adopting the right automated dispensing system in a pharmacy.

[20] cited (Miller, D., et. al., 2005).”“Adoption of Lean management strategies while not a simple task can help healthcare organizations improve processes and outcomes, reduce cost, and increase satisfaction among patients, providers and staff” . Balle [5] states that: “the adoption of lean in healthcare is very young it started in the late 90s but started to gain a little bit of momentum in the last decade and now in this decade many health organisations are looking at lean principles since it has been proven to be very successful in many cases around the world”.

Healthcare providers strive to improve service quality by implementing various quality management programs. Customers tend to seek for higher quality of care when choosing treatments, providers, and health plans. For healthcare organizations that desire to provide high quality care and compete in the global market, choosing a quality management program to implement is critical for performance and efficiency. Many studies have been conducted to analyze the effectiveness of such programs. Lean, Six Sigma and Total Quality Management (TQM) are three programs that will reviewed by three different case studies in efforts to understand them and to compare and contrast their capabilities.

The healthcare industry could apply lean concepts and benefit greatly from its findings. Lean is a different way of thinking and acting for an organization that can really give them a competitive edge over competing organizations. I am not sure if there is really a competition going on between healthcare organizations, but it could also contribute to fewer incidents, accidents, reduced costs, and improved employee morale. Lean is not a program that the organization uses for a short term, but rather a different way of doing business that has long term, long lasting effects for the organization overall. This method can also lead to the overall satisfaction of the patients that, in simple terms, means a returning customer.

In this process improvement, a problem statement is formulated to identify issues of pharmacy dispensing errors. The root cause analysis is investigated to answer why these problems occur. The stakeholder analysis is conducted and their considerations are summarized. “The central idea behind Six Sigma is that if you can measure how many “defects” you have in a process, you can systematically figure out how to eliminate them and get as close to “zero defects” as possible (Jacobs & Chase, 2014).” This process improvement project utilized lean six sigma methodology and poka-yokes mechanism to aid in exceptional quality and productivity while reducing cost and eliminating inefficiencies.

Set-up and workflow of my pharmacy is pretty good for patient centered care. Patient does not have to wait too long for their prescriptions to be filled. Patients can call for their refills via telephone or online, which makes their life easy as they don’t have bother coming in-person for refills. Patient profile shows all medication history as well as number of refills remaining. This makes it easy for pharmacist to know whether to refill a prescription or call doctor for refill request. After confirming to fill a prescription pharmacist runs claim through insurance and print label after claim is successful. All medication is arranged alphabetically on shelves, thus it is easy and quick to retrieve. Then after technician fills medication and then pharmacist checks it. This workflow is quite smooth and quick to process. Final check is done by pharmacist, who confirms right medication for right patient as well as the NDC dispensed, amount dispensed, direction for use, and day supply. All these steps of process take place on working table in sequential order, which helps to reduce errors in filling and have effective prescription filling. Once the prescription is filled pharmacist do all paper

What I’m documenting here is consistent with what I’ve been teaching and coaching people on in healthcare the last five years, especially. The concepts described here are directly influenced by Toyota (especially the book Toyota Talent: Developing Your People the Toyota Way) and, I believe, is very consistent with what’s expressed in Dt. Atul Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right). These points are also expressed in the chapter on Standardized Work in my book, Lean Hospitals: Improving Quality, Patient Safety, and Employee Satisfaction.

The exits manufacturing system had many error, waste and inefficiencies in shop floor and logistic (they wasted long time and valuable raw materials and sometimes the manufactured panels wasted because of weak layout design) , on the other hand on 2006 customer demands increased around 75 percent and managers need to enhance their manufacturing process efficiency to reduce their costs and respond sooner to the customer demand .in October 2006 Siemens AG sent a letter regarding the implementation of lean management in Kalwa company and mentioned they eagerness to improve Kalwa factory like the other branches during the world . They expected this implementation will enhance company’s capacity to triple during five or six years.

The Virginia Mason Production System (VMPS) is a management method that seeks to continually improve how work is done so there are zero defects in the final product. Using this method, Virginia Mason (VM) identifies and eliminates waste and inefficiency in the many processes that are part of the health care experience, making it possible for VM staff to deliver the highest quality and safest patient care. By streamlining repetitive and low-touch aspects of care delivery, staff members are freed to spend more time talking with, listening to and treating patients. VMPS is based on the Toyota Production System (TPS), a manufacturing approach Toyota has used for more than 50 years to

The operational systems of organizations can be viewed as open systems, which interact with their respective environments on a continuous basis. In this context, these systems comprise synergetic and interdependent subsystems of input, process and output with the main objective of these systems being to efficiently and effectively deliver goods and/or services to their demanding customers (Yasin and Wafa, 2002). Confronting the challenges of global competition, companies have to reduce costs, improve quality, and meet their customers’ ever-changing needs (Canel et al., 2000). Even though lean techniques were developed for the manufacturing firms and

The mission and daily operations in the healthcare industry varies from department to department. It is critical for employers and managers to learn and implement key components of the operational management to increase productivity, which in turn will yield greater results. Operations management is a vital component to the success of an organization. Managers must focus on identifying the weak areas of an organization and implement the most current strategic approaches, determine what business model works best within a department, place an emphasis on theories that motivate workers to met organizational goals, and the ensure the best practices are being used in the firm to produce optimal results. Operation management techniques are used to improve, increase and develop continuous development models that increase the productivity organizational growth. Models and ideals are used to help managers decide how to best utilize the labor pool, to perform tasks and patient treatments, logistic movement and IT support functions. This paper will examine how the principles of benchmarking, theory of constraints, six sigma, quality function deployment, business process reengineering, supply chain management, capacity scheduling and location planning, work