ONLINE EXCLUSIVE: Lean and Learning in Healthcare
Lea Tonkin, editor in chief
Learn how ThedaCare, a northern Wisconsin community-owned healthcare system, teamed with manufacturing to achieve significant organization-wide improvements during the AME/APQC Benchmarking Community of Practice (CoP) webinar. Dr. Roger A. Gerard, ThedaCare’s chief learning officer, will discuss the organization’s human development value stream and how employees at all levels used lean/learning principles to transform the enterprise. ThedaCare’s mission is “to improve the health of our communities.”
ThedaCare collaborated with manufacturing partners (primarily Ariens, also others) to create and sustain an improved learning and competency model, Gerard said. This approach contributes to financial performance as well as the quality of patient care.
Gerard, a presenter/panelist in three sessions during the recent AME Excellence Inside Dallas Conference, shared “lessons learned” about various aspects of ThedaCare’s cultural transformation. Its “True North” metrics, for example, focus on three main elements of customer satisfaction (access, turnaround time, and quality of time):
- Safety/Quality (preventable mortality, medication errors)
- People (OSHA recordable injuries, an employee engagement index, etc.)
- Financial Stewardship (operating margin, productivity).
Achieving performance improvements required a rigorous, sustained action plan, clarity of expectations, and the ability to respond to the needs of the people doing the day-to-day work, according to Gerard. Process accountability, one-on-one meetings with leaders, facilitator team mentorship, continuous daily improvement activities, weekly huddles, and daily visual tracking support the organization’s commitment to top performance.
ThedaCare’s five improvement system principles are:
- Value: what customers will pay for
- Value stream: steps that deliver value
- Flow: organizing the value stream to be continuous
- Pull: triggering flow from customer needs
- Perfection: continuous improvement forever (culture).
Gerard noted in a Dallas presentation on people redeployment that volume variation and sporadic demand required a paradigm shift from a separate redeployment flow to a single aligned flow that also includes internal transfers and external hires. “In addition, a culture of loyalty and trust is necessary for people to be open to changing roles and expectations, something that ThedaCare has fostered with its no-layoff philosophy, employee compact, and internal training/retraining activity,” he said. Gerard added that emerging models of care require tighter connections between hiring and changing role competencies, and that productivity gains will be the result of decreased time to productivity on the job, job alignment, and improved retention rates.
For information about how you can participate in the AME/APQC Benchmarking CoP webinars and other activities, contact Susan Chandler, manager of the CoP website.
Editor’s note: Susan Chandler, Ron Webb, and Bill Baker assisted in the development of this article.
