FEATURE – You don’t always need a lot of external help to initiate a lean transformation: the experience of the Emergency Department of the Hospital Clínic of Barcelona shows it can be done with very little support from the outside.
INTERVIEW – PL sits down with a consultant and a manager from the St Elisabeth hospital in the Netherlands to talk about the organization’s “loving care” approach to treating patients.
ARTICLE – While supporting the adoption of lean in a Mozambican hospital, a young engineer learned a number of valuable lessons on leadership and what it really takes to help developing countries to grow.
FEATURE – Menlo Innovations has proved there is a different, more "joyful" way of running a software development company – could those same lessons be applied to the healthcare industry?
FEATURE – Introducing initial assessments by senior doctors and bedside diagnostics to improve the efficiency of the Emergency Department: a lean healthcare experiment in England.
FEATURE – No healthcare transformation can succeed without a system-wide approach to change. In this article, Dr. John Toussaint, offers his take on the issue, providing a guide for healthcare executives.
ARTICLE - Improving healthcare architecture means truly meeting patient requirements. This article reflects on the power of 3P design and looks at an implementation in the North East of England.
FEATURE – What makes a mentor-mentee relationship successful? This intimate account comes all of the way from a Tanzania healthcare organization, and proves how lean is fundamentally about “caring for people.”
RESEARCH - In the last 10 years lean has made its way in many hospitals and healthcare systems, often with impressive results. Professor Dan Jones looks back at the lessons learned throughout the decade.
CASE STUDY - Three successful improvement projects at a hospital in Guangzhou are proving that lean healthcare in China is an opportunity that the sector cannot afford to miss.
ARTICLE - There is more to TWI than applications in our jobs. In this article, a creative mother shares the moving story of how she used Job Instructions to help her 5-year-old son with Asperger Syndrome.
COLUMN - In the third article of our series, the CEO of a healthcare institution in Catalonia, Spain, discusses the implementation of lean as a mindset that has its foundations in continuous improvement.
CASE STUDY - This article reports on the efforts that Erasmus Medical Center in the Netherlands has made to apply Theory of Constraints to patients' length of stay.
INTERVIEW - New York City's public hospitals system leveraged lean principles and techniques to improve the quality of care and boost organizational performance.
CASE STUDY - In the past two years, the Consorci Sanitari del Garraf near Barcelona experienced a lean turnaround. The author gives us an overview of the key building blocks of this transformation.
CASE STUDY - What does having a new “true north” mean? Following the merger with a large group, cancer center IOV is looking to seamlessly spread its lean management system to new operations and facilities.
Lean thinking may have been born in Toyota in the 1950s and 1960s, but it wasn’t until after the year 2000 that a few hospitals began to explore its application to the healthcare industry (lean healthcare). These pioneering organizations came together to share their stories at the first Global Lean Healthcare Summit in the UK in 2007, which in turn triggered many more experiments around the world. Since then, interest has kept growing.
Some fifteen years on, we have hundreds of examples to learn from, from clinics and departments through to entire hospitals and even whole hospital systems. Not all early experiments succeeded, and we are still a long way from making lean a widely recognized way of working across the industry.
Healthcare providers around the world still face huge challenges, as ageing populations and unhealthy lifestyles boost the demand for healthcare faster than the growth of incomes and tax revenues from the middle classes. At the same time, the quality of care has not improved as much as the quality of other services in the economy, which is why more and more healthcare organizations are turning to lean.
Historically, lean healthcare ideas have been applied in large hospitals, but in the past few years we have started to see the philosophy adopted in earnest in many smaller organizations following a do-it-yourself approach that has generated many positive benefits. An impressive example is the Consorci Sanitari del Garraf near Barcelona.