DailyKaizen

On Friday, I was a guest lecturer for a class my boss is teaching at the University of Washington Executive MHA Program: “Process Quality Management.” The name of the class makes me laugh a bit because I think of my training as a physician and ask myself, “what does a doctor know about process quality management?”

Rather than me answering that question, I’m going to ask the students in the class to answer it here, by commenting on this post. One thing I think I didn’t do as well as I wanted to during the session was to get input from these health care leaders about our approach. Luckily, through the technology of a blog, the conversation doesn’t have to end. I have to say I was impressed that several of the students had read this blog or were reading it before I walked into the room. Class prep now includes reading the lecturer’s blog as well as readings…times have changed!

My presentation technique aside, there were two concrete things that we’ve done based on LEAN philosophy that I discussed that struck me as transformational:

1. The “emergency response team” we have created, based on Toyota principles, to democratize the action of alerting the organization to patient safety issues. In much of health care, there’s a sense of hierarchy that can prevent quality problems from coming to light. Earlier this year, we changed our processes to allow anyone to “pull the andon cord” for a suspected patient safety issue involving our electronic systems. During my talk, my cell phone vibrated several times. I checked in after the session and learned that these calls were an emergency response team alert, fielded by one of the physicians on my team. A potential issue had been discovered and acted on immediately, no questions asked.

2. Involvement of the customer. I am going into a kaizen event with several teams this week. This is the first kaizen where we will have one of our patients there the entire time. It will affirm that we can do our work on behalf of members with them “in the room” figuratively, and literally. We are here because of them. Let us learn in real time how we can provide the best value for their time and money. Both the LEAN philosophy and our organizational heritage (we were founded by patients) fully support us in doing this. It’s terrific for it to come together in this way.

Maybe there were others…comments are open…