DailyKaizen

I am going to be speaking at a National Conference on Quality in early July to Health Care Quality Directors, Providers and Consultants on what Group Health has been doing “with this LEAN thing.” Last night I finished up my PowerPoint for the presentation. This gave me the opportunity to reflect on how far we have come in a year on our LEAN journey, and how far we still need to go. One year ago today we had only worked with two departments and only a handful of employees. In the last year we have worked with more then fifteen departments and touched hundred of employees. Our projects not only include clinical areas, but also administrative, sales, finance, and information systems.

In retrospect it seems like we have come a long way, but every morning on my way to work I feel a great urgency. With every improvement that we make we uncover ten more problems that we need to address. The potential is energizing, but the task is daunting. To be successful in our journey we need to energize all of our staff to own and lead improvement from where they work. We need to not only re-engineer our processes, but also change the behaviors that shape our culture.

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