Lean Healthcare Archives | Page 11 of 12

Giving Lean Healthcare a Bad Name

By Jon Miller - June 5th, 2006

We’re giving Lean healthcare a bad name in Jean’s world. Jean is a nurse at a hospital where Lean healthcare practices based on the Toyota Production System are being implemented. At Jean’s hospital, it sounds like they a

Good News! Hospitals are Healing Themselves through Kaizen

By Jon Miller - May 16th, 2006

“All the things wrong with hospitals can be fixed.” Narrator Lloyd Dobyns tells us at the beginning of the video program Good News…How Hospitals Heal Themselves In the video program hospital administrators and clinicians tell

Pandemic Preparation: Just in Time or Just in Case?

By Jon Miller - January 16th, 2006

In a January 12, 2006 Wall Street Journal article (which you can also find on the Pittsburgh Post Gazette) titled Just-in-Time Inventories Make U.S. Vulnerable in a Pandemic raises a question that is very common to organizations first

Crossing the Chasm of Lean Transformation, Part 2

By Jon Miller - December 31st, 2005

Should the “wrong” approached be replaced by a path more closely following the one Toyota has taken? The “Training Within Industry” modeled approach to developing people and Toyota’s hyper cost-focused man

Crossing the Chasm of Lean Transformation, Part 1

By Jon Miller - December 30th, 2005

A friend of mine who is a VP of Operations at a Midwestern hospital asked me two questions a few days ago. The first was “What is the percentage of Lean implementations that fail?” This is a loaded question, and not one for

Lean Healthcare: Increase Value or Reduce Waste?

By Jon Miller - July 25th, 2005

Today I had the opportunity to address the general session of the 43rd annual conference of the Association for Healthcare Resource & Materials Management. There were about 1,500 people in the audience, perhaps 1,000 Materials Man

The State of Lean Healthcare: Critical Mass is Building

By Jon Miller - May 7th, 2005

The development of the awareness and practice of Lean in the healthcare sector has been interesting to watch over the last several years. Although a great number of people who work in healthcare are still in the “unaware” c

The Four Elements for Sustaining Kaizen

By Jon Miller - February 19th, 2005

One of the most frequent questions we encounter form our customers and prospects is the issue of how to sustain the gains made through kaizen and other continuous improvement efforts. In a recent discussion among our consultants, we ca

Where Does Lean Apply in Hospitals?

By Jon Miller - November 8th, 2004

Friday afternoon is a great time to call up customers and find out what’s on their minds. At Gemba Academy, we continue to talk with hospitals that are doing kaizen and pioneering Lean Healthcare. So last Friday, I put on the hea

Streamlining Eye Surgery: Innovation in India

By Jon Miller - November 2nd, 2004

In the October 11, 2004 issue of BusinessWeek (The Innovation Economy issue, page 176) there was an interesting article providing an example of Lean thinking applied to healthcare. Lean Processes in Practice: Aravind Eye-Care’s H

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