DailyKaizen

This is a little bit of a commercial break as I get a little caught up on things, but there’s definitely a LEAN connection to be made. This article made the front page of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer on Friday about our organization’s work changing the relationship between patients and physicians:

The doctor will e-mail you now

What is great about the article is not what is said about us, but what is reported about all of the other major healthcare organizations in our community. They are all working to find ways to be closer to their patients. This is not the norm in many communities around our country, where the emphasis is on limiting patient access in the name of efficiency.

I put this together with several conversations I have had recently with physicians from some of the most innovative health care organizations in the United States. The ones I admire, or should I say, the organizations I would most want to be a patient in, are not all doing exactly what we are doing with technology. They may give cell phone numbers to patients for easy access, for example. The theme of what they are doing is the same though - they are working to be closer to their patients, not farther away. These are the organizations that you can bring LEAN philosophy to and they say, “When can we do that?” And they probably will, if they have someone like Lee walking around with a copy of “Lean Thinking.”

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