DailyKaizen

Here’s proof that you can bring LEAN into your every day work, even in a small (and vital!) 501(c)3 non-profit organization. Stimulated by my trip to LEI, I put together this very basic visual system with my colleague Josh Seidman, Ph.D. for the work we are doing. It’s hosted at the Center for Information Therapy, with a duplicate paper copy for me. Since every good visual system deserves a theme, I chose the Washington, DC Metro as my analogy, with work yet to be undertaken located at the Shady Grove station, active work located at the Bethesda station, and completed work at the Dupont Circle station (since that’s where I return to every day).

Related to this, I have been spending time with organizations that I would formerly consider the “Have Nots” - those without the relatively rich resources (mission, vision, as well as financial) of an integrated delivery system. And guess what, they are innovating in very impressive ways, using techniques that are very consistent with LEAN. There’s a write-up of a recent encounter I had with the American College of Physicians’ Center for Practice Innovation on my other blog. Almost every presentation demonstrated work that was directly related to components of LEAN philosophy. I was incredibly impressed.

I commented to the group in my presentation that a large organization is actually at high risk for wasting one of the most important raw materials in health care, the ideas of its patients and providers. It’s something that they have to be careful of every day. Smaller practices, on the other hand, can put ideas into action very quickly and run PDCA cycles in a fraction of the time. At the conference I was at, I found that some of my past impressions of various technological solutions aren’t valid in the rest of health care - they may work just fine, and in fact have less overhead. This has been great for me to see, because it means that LEAN truly is accessible to the majority of health care that does happen in small practices, and they can see the benefit financially and emotionally from serving patients in they way they always hoped when they graduated from medical school.

Maybe this is not a revelation to audience members working with smaller practices (are you out there? what are you doing?) but it is affirmation for me that everyone has a role to play in transforming medicine to become patient centered, maybe starting with hosting a blog about your improvement efforts :).

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