Lean Healthcare Archives | Page 5 of 6

101 Kaizen Templates: The Checklist

By Jon Miller - January 6th, 2008

This is the first post in the 101 kaizen templates series. Only 100 more kaizen templates to go. Takt time is 3.5 days per template. I considered planning out and structuring this series but for now we’ll just go with the flow an

Free Videos on Lean Healthcare, Toyota Production System

By Jon Miller - November 5th, 2007

Here are a pair of free videos on YouTube. The first is titled A Quick Introduction to Lean Thinking and it is brought to you by the NHS group Institute for Innovation and Improvement. Some of the graphics and examples of Lean in healt

Is IT the Key to Improving Healthcare Quality and Efficiency?

By Jon Miller - July 30th, 2007

Is IT the key to improving healthcare quality and efficiency? The majority of healthcare opinion leaders seem to think so. The findings from the Commonwealth Fund/Modern Healthcare Opinion Leaders Survey appeared in the July 30 edition

Is Michael Moore a Lean Thinker?

By Jon Miller - July 11th, 2007

Monday on the Lean Blog Mark Graban did some interesting reflection and analysis on claims by filmmaker Michael Moore that 18,000 people die each year in the U.S. due to the lack of health insurance. The U.S. population, per Google, is

Medicare May Stop Paying for Hospital Errors

By Jon Miller - May 23rd, 2007

Medicare may stop paying for hospital errors in 2008, according to a May 22, 2007 article from IndyStar.com titled Hospital-borne ailments face Medicare budget ax. According to the article: Medical mistakes are deadly and expensive. In

Seven Ideas Towards a Healing Workplace

By Jon Miller - May 8th, 2007

The entry last week on Standards, Abnormality and the Ideal seems to have struck a chord with folks. I’ve been thinking further about the idea of negative accidents or negative safety incidents and it is quite sound in theory and

A Fairly Lean Healthcare Experience

By Jon Miller - April 9th, 2007

I hope everyone who celebrates Easter had a good Easter Sunday, and those of you who don’t also had a good weekend. Thanks to a culture change in my throat brought on by some visiting Streptococcus, I didn’t have a good wee

Toyota Production System as a Learning System

By Jon Miller - October 8th, 2006

There is a new working paper by Michael Balle, author of The Gold Mine, that explores how the Toyota Production System (TPS) is a learning system. The paper takes a hospital in France as a case study and highlights the importance of st

Healthcare Costs Can Be Cut

By Jon Miller - September 15th, 2006

Healthcare cost can be cut. So says a Pittsburgh Tribune-Review article by the same title on September 14, 2006. The examples from Virginia Mason Medical Center do demonstrate that healthcare costs can be cut, but is this enough? The a

Lean Healthcare Plumbs New Depths at ?? Hospital

By Jon Miller - August 14th, 2006

The news from Jean’s workplace, where consultants have been giving Lean healthcare a bad name, has gotten worse. Jean writes: I think we, as a staff are beginning to feel like chicken pluckers in the Golden Plump Place where Fast

Every Day is a Good Day for Daily Kaizen in Lean Healthcare

By Jon Miller - July 3rd, 2006

Today is a good day for Daily Kaizen! The intranet blog for the Lean healthcare team at Group Health Cooperative is now open to the public. The authors are Lee Fried, internal consultant who is spearheading the Lean effortsat Group Hea

NHS Confederation Releases “Lean Thinking for the NHS”

By Jon Miller - June 14th, 2006

The United Kingdom has taken an important step in leading the Lean healthcare movement today with the publication of Lean Thinking for the NHS by the NHS Confederation (National Health Service) based on studies done by the Lean Enterpr

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 (also 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 starting out imple

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 Mana

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

Lean Fundamental: Do Today’s Work Today

By Jon Miller - July 28th, 2004

Working with clients struggling with non-Lean scheduling methods reminded me of the fundamental Lean principle of “Do today’s work today.” This principle involves avoiding late deliveries, matching capacity to demand,

Lean Customer Service

By Jon Miller - July 26th, 2004

According to an often-cited statistic from Harvard Business Review: “Developing a new client relationship costs between six to eight times more than maintaining an existing relationship”. Spending six times more on customer

Applying Flow to Healthcare

By Jon Miller - February 4th, 2004

An increasing number of hospitals and healthcare organizations are getting seriously interested in applying Lean to their facilities and organizations. As we all know, healthcare costs are high and patient wait times are long. Anyone w

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