DailyKaizen

As I have alluded to in the past, I think LEAN in health care will continue to get traction as more organizations tell their stories candidly. It is in the spirit that I post some excellent questions from one of our readers, in the hope that fellow experts here will provide their experience. If you are able to in your comments, let us know what organization you are either coming from, or where you got the experience that you did (as appropriate).

As I post this I remember contemplating heavily any mention of my organization or the people within it in this format when we first started. It’s a process to go through, in and industry that’s challenged by the concept of transparency. One outcome here is to hopefully normalize sharing for more organizations, as I have on the other blog I co-run (http://www.pchit.org).

Thank you, and comment away, please!

I am involved in the very early stages of a lean implementation in healthcare. Maybe you have addressed this on your blog, but one our struggles has been defining the best process for implementing lean. We are establishing a model line in food
services and are looking to begin spreading to other departments.

Our model line is still in a very early stage of development and we have only 2 engineers (as the major lean advocates) to support the hospital. Our focus has been to use a lean management system as a starting point. Some of the questions we have are:

How far to we take the model line before moving out?
How much training should we do beforehand?
If we start with the lean management, how developed does this need to be before
it is self-sustaining?
At what point do we need complete buy-in from senior management?
What should our implementation process look like?
And the inevitable question of how much is too much change? (Rhetorical)

Our approach so far has been to implement based on need. When the model line has an issue, we implement as much as we can to support that issue. The only constant has been a lean management system that I seem to be implementing with everything. We really have not done much training, but are now rethinking that to include much more. Our resources are limited, so my hope is that with education and a “push start” from us, the department will be able to realize success to keep things sustained. Past experience says this may not be realistic.

My thought is, that if we are going to do this, we should do it right. The thought has crossed my mind of value stream mapping the transformation process, but I would like a more experienced perspective on what the value adding steps are. Thanks again for your thoughts.

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