Beyond Manufacturing: Lean in Health Care

ONLINE EXCLUSIVE:
Beyond Manufacturing: Lean in Health Care

By Marco Lam and Brenda Adams

	Marco Lam, PhD

	Brenda Adams

In my MBA Lean Systems course, I typically introduce students to lean with examples of manufacturing processes because the steps in these processes tend to be more identifiable and more tangible. As those of us familiar with lean know, these principles and the resultant thinking can be useful in service sectors as well.  Now that the Supreme Court has upheld the Affordable Care Act (ACA), we have a unique opportunity to install a culture of continuous improvement in our health care system using lean.

Kevin Mosser, M.D., executive vice president and chief operating officer at WellSpan Health, said, “All lean defined types of waste are present in our systems and processes, which lead to lower quality, higher cost and restricted access.” By developing a lean culture, health care providers can reduce the waste and redundancy in delivering services that negatively impacts quality, cost and patient access. This will be paramount as both public and private stakeholders prepare to implement the Affordable Care Act.

Some of my former students have found that lean tools can be easily translated to a health care setting. For instance, Sandy Tompkins, MBA, RN,shared that“at the Wound Healing Center we are working with a Visual Display Board (SQDCM Charts). Just as in a manufacturing setting, lean in health care requires us to listen to the Voice of the Customer.”Dan Robertson, MBA, a senior process improvement specialist at WellSpan Health, said, “In general I think that moving the discussions about improvement from the perspective of volume and/or cost to one of value will have the most impact for improvement in health care. This thought is second by Mosser.

Finally, achieving the lean perspective of seeing every process through the eyes of the customer, i.e., the patient and/or family, will drive processes resulting in higher access and satisfaction.”Of course, health care has its own unique challenges. As Mosser points out, “Providers of all types have been trained in a world honoring autonomy and individualization of care, and biased against standardization. In addition, the pace of change and workload in health care has never been faster or higher, and it is very challenging to get folks to understand the value of the investment in removing waste from their work.”

Incorporating lean thinking and practices into the health care arena presents opportunities for this service sector to benefit from what many manufacturing organizations have already experienced with lean. Educating today’s health care professionals and those who will enter the field in the fundamentals and application of Lean will help address the quality, cost and access issues that continue to plague health care.