DailyKaizen

Our Informatics team has been spending a lot of time at the Gemba for the last year. In our non-profit health system, the Gemba is not a manufacturing plant. It’s a medical center where real people tell their stories and go through the healing process. And I now see that the time there has been transformational far beyond what we did to help the individual patients we met.

Every day, our work designing and supporting health information technology systems brings a new challenge. some of them quite incredible. Very recently, when confronted with a challenge, I found myself in a room with managers who had been there (to the Gemba), and I found myself working with people who knew the impact of what we are doing. No arguments about what should be done - we did what a patient would want us to do. It was actually remarkable for me to see.

If there is ever talk about physicians not being systems thinkers, there is talk from physicians about non-physicians understanding the content of care. The people I work with understand the content of care, courtesy of many patients, physicians, and nurses who selflessly invited them into exam rooms to learn during our transformation. We have MD’s on the team that serve important roles, of course. The entire team, though, understands that everyone provides care.

So here’s my hypothesis: Time spent in the medical center with patients is like time exercising at the gym - it conditions and creates biological reserves for future body stressors. The gemba seems to do the same thing, conditioning and creating reserves for future stressors. The caveat is that regular conditioning is required!

To provide care, I don’t think you have to do surgery, read an x-ray, write a prescription, or have an M.D. You just have to know what it means to be there for a patient.

When you can provide health care, you can improve health care.