More Eff icient, More Effective
Going Lean in Health Care
JEAN HARDIMAN
In 2012, HEALTHMEDX, a provider of information system solutions, reported that for every dollar spent in health care, more than 75 cents was being spent on the non-patient care activities of communicating, scheduling, coordinating, supervising and documenting care. According to the organization, waste in health care ranged between 30-40 percent nationally.
Officials at Cabell Huntington Hospital( CHH) knew they could do better, and in 2014, the hospital established a lean transformation program that has led to thousands of dollars in cost savings along with improved patient care and satisfaction.
“ The lean philosophy is that the people doing the processes should also improve the processes, so at Cabell Huntington Hospital, we engage multidisciplinary teams of employees and physicians who are actually performing the processes to analyze and devise improvements,” says Keith Biddle, CHH’ s lean manager.“ We dedicate the time necessary to analyze our processes because, in the long run, well-designed processes save time and effort and improve quality. That way, our employees and physicians will spend less time and effort working around problems and instead spend more time and effort adding value to the experiences of our patients.”
Toyota’ s Lean Success
The lean philosophy has been working for Toyota for decades and was implemented along with the founding of the
Toyota Motor Manufacturing West Virginia( TMMWV) plant in Buffalo in 1997. There are two main pillars of the Toyota Production System, or TPS, according to Charles Jarrell, assistant manager for training and development at TMMWV: just-in-time delivery and jidoka, a form of error-proofing that involves stopping work quickly to find the cause of a problem and develop a solution.
According to Jarrell, the company only produces the product it needs, when it needs it, in the amount that is needed. The company runs very lean, and when a machine needs a part, it stops on its own, and the line is stopped so the problem is not passed along.
“ Everything we do is a commitment to TPS,” says Jarrell.“ You’ d be surprised at how little inventory we have and our high frequency of deliveries. We have external trucks set up to run more frequently and internal trucks set up to run parts from one area to another. It forces us to do problem solving on a daily basis. We don’ t have the inventory to cushion our mistakes.”
This leads to the practice of jishuken, which is a term related to studying and solving problems.“ We identify a small worksite with a problem, and we put together a multidisciplinary team of usually 10 or 12 members to study the problem quickly. They report out in four and a half
ExEdge
In 1913, Henry Ford discovered a way to produce cars more efficiently with the assembly line, which led to the creation of lean manufacturing.
Source: www. lean. org
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