Planet Lean: The Official online magazine of the Lean Global Network
Transforming people to transform the healthcare industry

Transforming people to transform the healthcare industry

Alice Lee, Flávio Battaglia and Oriol Cuatrecasas
October 20, 2017

VIDEO INTERVIEW – Last year, the Lean Global Network launched an initiative to leverage the knowledge of our institutes to positively impact the healthcare industry. We caught up with the group in São Paulo this week.


Interviewees: Alice Lee, Executive Director of the Lean Enterprise Institute; Flávio Battaglia, Director of the Lean Institute Brasil; and Oriol Cuatrecasas, President of the Institute Lean Management in Barcelona.

Music by: https://www.bensound.com


How do you transform a whole industry? By transforming the people working in it!

Last year, the Lean Global Network tasked a group of lean healthcare experts (and enthusiasts) to start an initiative to explore new and better ways to impact the industry - the Lean Healthcare Initiative.

As soon as they started working together, the team members - Alice Lee of the Lean Enterprise Institute, Flávio Battaglia of Lean Institute Brasil, Oriol Cuatrecasas of Barcelona-based Instituto Lean Management, and Vyacheslav Boltrukevich of Lean Enterprise Institute Russia (soon to be joined by Denise Bennett from the Australian affiliate of LGN) - agreed that the number one challenge the sector faces is the long lead-time to develop the capabilities a hospital or clinic needs to turn itself around.

The team is carrying out extensive research on the lean journeys of a number of hospitals across the United States, Catalunya and Brazil that LGN institutes in those countries have worked with. Using the Lean Transformation Framework as a reference, they gathered and analyzed data to identify the commonalities between these very different transformations. Their aim is to come up with a set of guidelines that can help hospitals around the world effect change more rapidly and effectively than they are currently able to do.

As we wait for the Working Group to complete its research, we asked three of its members to tell us about the method they are using, the objective they have, and what they hope to bring to the industry that impacts our lives more than any other.

Check out their answers in the video below, which we shot a couple of days ago in São Paulo, at the end of the third Lean Healthcare Summit (an event attended by 300 people, 75% of whom were - encouragingly - physicians).


THE INTERVIEWEES

Alice Lee photograph
Alice Lee is the Executive Director of the Lean Enterprise Institute
Flávio Battaglia photograph
Flávio Battaglia is the Director of Lean Institute Brasil
Oriol Cuatrecasas photograph
Oriol Cuatrecasas is President of Instituto Lean Management in Barcelona

Read more

Lean thinking and the challenges it will face
October 14, 2014
Lean thinking and the challenges it will face

ARTICLE - How can creativity and standards coexist? How do we move beyond silos? How do we fully understand the voice of the customer? Dan Jones reflects on three key questions for the lean movement.

Continue reading
A pioneer in applying lean to the education sector in Brazil
October 16, 2017
A pioneer in applying lean to the education sector in Brazil

INTERVIEW – Grupo Anima, a Brazilian private education organization with almost 100,000 high-school students enrolled, has revolutionized its culture since introducing lean. But it all started with one project…

Continue reading
Defining lean is useful, lean definitions are useless
May 16, 2019
Defining lean is useful, lean definitions are useless

FEATURE – In this article, the author reflects on how his understanding of lean thinking evolved over time – as did the way he defined it.

Continue reading
Creating a model primary care unit
April 7, 2022
Creating a model primary care unit

CASE STUDY – This primary care unit in Brazil is hoping to become a model for other units in their system. Take note, this is how Lean Thinking can spread across healthcare systems.

Continue reading

Read more

No items found.