DailyKaizen

Like the rest of the readers of this blog, I am following Lee’s adventures with interest and excitement. He is working on the health plan side of our organization, and I am still interested and focused on clinical care delivery. One thing that’s wonderful about our joint journey is that we are able to cover all aspects of health care, from financing all the way through to health services.

I’ve been away on vacation, and in addition, our team is in the midst of a reconfiguration, to support a very large software upgrade. This makes my role seem more like being along for the ride. Ordinarily (or should I say, Pre-LEAN), that might be an uncomfortable place to be. It’s not now, since those who are guiding this work are using LEAN principles and are impressing me with their imagination. We’re dabbling a bit in Agile development on one major project. On another, one-piece flow cross-functional configuration is being employed. I have not yet completed a large software project using LEAN.

I expect to be getting new content next week, when I’ll be attending a training in Hoshin planning with others, on behalf of the organization. I’m looking forward to that, and really pleased that as part of our transformation, our leadership supports learning along the way. This comes at some cost to our members in the short term; this is a reminder of our long-term commitment to the health and happiness of those we serve.

Only other update I’d provide is the usefulness of our philosophical principles in so many situations in just the past few weeks. In a request for new functionality that was brought to me, I asked to hear about it, but from the patient perspective only. The response was, “We haven’t thought about it in that way.” We proceeded to have a great conversation where we were able to capture the need from the patient perspective, and at that point what we needed to do was also made more clear. I left the conversation with yet another reminder that I have never met a care team that didn’t want to take great care of patients.