DailyKaizen

As part of my journey to understand LEAN in different environments for the purpose of growing it everywhere, I was invited to tour the Regional Laboratory at Kaiser Permanente Mid-Atlantic, one of the regions of our national affiliate, Kaiser Permanente.

As I posted previously, I have been observing the leaders and staff of this organization begin to embrace LEAN, and have been looking for more examples of LEAN practices in our nation’s capital. Luckily, I am finding them now, and this was a terrific example.

A case study about the lab’s transformation has been posted online.

I know many of the readers here have worked in lab medicine in LEAN transformations, so I am going to start by admitting a very naive perception that I have had of lab services as a family practice physician:

Whenever I have walked by a clinical lab, I have assumed that all of the big machines meant that everything was standardized and automated. The sample goes in the machine. The machine reports it. The patient and I use the data. Compared to primary care, what could be non-standard about laboratory processes?

(end naive perception)

Outside of the big machines there are huge potentials for variation and waste, and the impact is incredible. We started our tour with the story as told by the lab’s leaders. A decision was made to regionalize lab services, and the new facility came with a templated version of lab layout, which included walls, pillars, and separation of staff and machinery. The team knew they needed LEAN (more on that later) and started on a journey to build an operation that incorporated LEAN philosophy throughout.

For a service organization that performs about 5 million reportable tests a year, the impact is significant. The case study lays this out well, so I will focus on what I saw.

Pictures, click on any to see in gallery format

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