DailyKaizen

While Lee (and many of you!) were in Orlando, I was in San Diego for the Health 2.0 Conference. I posted something of a play by play on my regular blog (they had tables reserved for bloggers, I had to earn my keep!).

What was eye opening about the event is/was that as much as we work to move our health systems further and faster toward a patient centered reality, there is a whole industry springing up that is already there, and creating their own reality in the void that still exists. They are both exasperated with mainstream health care and restless at the same time. The result is that our platforms will burn brighter and our relative biases toward inaction will melt away. I was reminded last week that we do have biases toward inaction. I needed that.

At the same time I engaged with a real consumer-centered world, I also visited some very well regarded medical groups and co-facilitated my first ever strategy deployment session with a group not-affiliated with our health care organization.

On the medical group visit, I had the sensation of meeting another American in Europe, when while doing the planning, I indicated that I wanted be as close to the patients as possible. The response was, “Oh, you want to come to the Gemba.” It was a wonderful thing to hear because the conversation instantly changed. Later on the week, though, with a different audience, though, I was asked about using the Japanese terms in mixed audiences and whether that enhanced or degraded understanding of LEAN. I need to watch myself a bit more, to prevent jargonization and some of the concerns Lee mentioned in his last post.

On the strategy deployment session, I was definitely on the nervous side as a non-affiliated outsider. I’m sure this is a feeling that many of the readers here have had in their careers! I saw how the process itself and the stage set by leadership allowed people to leverage the ideas to their maximum. I walked the group through my own experience transitioning to a hoshin process from 2004-2007. I had actually never compiled our story together with photographs, and it was great reflection for me to create a story reminiscent of Atlas Industries in Pascal Dennis’ book. If any of our readers are not documenting your stories through photographs (and maybe a blog…? ), please do it. It will help you and those who come after you.

There were many things in the last week, and in the last 5 months that make me believe that we could reach critical mass for respectful continuous improvement methodologies in health care as a standard. The consumer movement in health care, technological advances, and the mixing of generational experience (Boomer – GenX – GenY) in leadership make it possible. When that happens, we’ll all be world citizens and it won’t be like meeting another American in Europe anymore.

Do others agree? Could we make this the standard across medical education and health system leadership in the next 10 years? How about the next 5?

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