DailyKaizen

Lee and I ventured up to the top of the Space Needle (his first time!) to talk about how we might convey what we are doing to our audience. Our most important audience, in my opinion, is our members, who will ask how we are using their resources. There are other audiences, including other LEAN experts, and all of health care. Speaking to them is consistent with our stated organizational purpose, to “transform health care, working together every day to improve the care and well-being of our consumers and communities.” I think we are fortunate to be supported in doing what we do with a purpose like this.

At the same time, I ran across this commentary from Jack and Suzy Welch from this week’s BusinessWeek. In the second question they respond to, they talk about transparency being a benefit, and a peril. In their podcast this week, they go into it in a bit more detail, as well. The conclusion that I come to is similar to theirs - doing business in an open way is helpful, but requires some work. We have to be able to understand for ourselves what we are doing and why it is useful if we are going to be open about it. In addition, we are required to protect our membership in everything we do. I think we can do this, carefully.

On Friday I conducted a 30 day post-Kaizen review with a team in one of our Administrative areas.  During the event we standardized the work of four different teams and formed one large work cell to eliminate the need for handoffs between teams.  This meant that the staff working in these areas went from being specialists to generalist basically overnight. The team was very skeptical that a single person could know all that it took to do a piece of work without having to hand it off.  In other words, they did not believe it was possible for a single person to have all the knowledge that was held collectively within four teams in the “old way.” 

There skepticism was understandable, because they did not have standard work, thus they did not understand its value.  Over the last 30 days the team has had some change management challenges, but it is working!  Four team members are fully trained and the rest of the team is right behind them.  Cycle times are dropping rapidly, and most team members were quick to voice their excitement about the new process.  Standard work is a powerful tool.

There is no question in my mind that since we have transformed our health information technology work to a LEAN process that our pace has increased.

Without any extra resources.

What does this say to our members, who are paying us to transform their health care experience and the health care experience of patients across the U.S.?

A lot.

Every week, we receive a weekly update of important changes to our clinical information system that we want our clinicians to know about. This communication vehicle is actually a holdover from our pre-LEAN days. However, it still has purpose. What I am seeing every week is that the changes and improvements being talked about in the weekly update are becoming more and more significant. More transformative. More applicable to the daily practice of our clinicians. I just read the most recent one that came out and felt the impact.

If one of our members asked me what that impact was, the first thing I would say is, “wow, that improvement is really going to help you and your physicians.” The second thing I would say is, “wow, that improvement didn’t come from us (the Informatics team). It came from you.”

If one of our members were to ask me today, “Is LEAN helping my resources do more to keep me healthy?” I would answer an unqualified “yes.” It’s working.